I purchased a Pablo digitizing tablet, which seems to be a grown-up version
of a Kidboard. It came with a floppy with drivers and a CD with Art Dabbler
and Goo.  The tablet attaches to the PC with a cable that has one plug to go
to a serial port, another to go to the keyboard PS/2 port, and a splitter
off the PS/2 plug end to plug the keyboard into.

I have tried to get this hardware to work on two different PCs, one is an
off-the-shelf e-Machine 266 with 32 meg memory, the other is a Micron
Pentium Pro 200 with 96 meg memory and SCSI hard drive & CD; both are
running Win98.  When I tried to set up the tablet (according to mfg
directions), the same thing happened on both machines: PC recognized that
there was new hardware, prompted for setting up driver, found the driver on
the A: disk, and everything seemed fine.  The tablet itself doesn't have any
buttons, switches, or other controls, just an "idiot light" which was on (I
guess indicating it was getting power).  The pen attaches to the tablet with
a plug that looks like a stereo jack.  The pen has a barrel switch that can
be set up to be either a left double-click or a right single-click through a
control panel applet, and the pen point is pressure sensitive and pressing
hard twice is supposed to be like a left double-click.

The Art Dabbler software seems to work fine with the mouse (except that's
like trying to draw with the end of a baseball bat) but I can't seem to get
the tablet to work right.  At first it doesn't do anything at all, then when
I click the barrel button (when set on double-click), it will draw but won't
end the line even when I pick the pen up off the board (it seems to be like
permanently holding down a left mouse button).  When the barrel button was
set to right-click, when I first touched the pen to the tablet it located
the cursor there and wouldn't do anything else.  In neither case did the pen
work to select menu items or interface buttons, and once I clicked the pen
button neither my mouse or keyboard would work until I reboot. (I haven't
tried it with the Goo software because of puny HD size and just not
interested in it.)

I would appreciate any help that you could give me--does this seem to be
defective hardware, or is there something I'm doing wrong? I hope it's not
bad hardware because it was more than a month after I bought it (on sale at
CompUSA) before I had a chance to try it.  Thanks in advance...

Heather Duncan
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