Vista Hacks: Making My Wacom Serial Tablet Work

March 31, 2007 by 143 Comments

As I mentioned previously, the one hardware issue I’ve had with Vista was the inability to get Vista to properly deal with my serial Wacom Intuos tablet.

After a couple e-mails and a phone call to Wacom’s support group, the solution and steps are this:

  1. Download Wacom’s latest driver from their web site.
  2. Create the following registry key if it doesn’t exist:
       [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tablet]
      "PnPTablets"=",COM1"
  3. Plug in the tablet. If Windows prompts for a driver, hit cancel.
  4. Install the Wacom driver.  The tablet should work after the driver is installed.
  5. Reboot.  If Windows prompts to install a driver for the hardware, choose the option not to present the message again.

The tablet should work from that point forward.
[tags]wacom, intuos, vista[/tags]

Filed Under: Code, Technology ·
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  • KOZMOGRAF/X motion & design

    THANK YOU AARON. With to your registry modification, I am now able to use my old (but awesome) GD 0405 R tablet on my Win 7 64-bit box!! I have to use a serial-to-USB converter cable and the 6.10.6 Wacom driver (installed as Win 2000) AND IT WORKS! (However, so far, now I get the odd Visual Basic error, which I just ignore, and oddly, CorelDraw X5 won’t open at all, though all of my Adobe and Microsoft apps work. This doesn’t derail me, but it would be nice to have Coreldraw functional. No luck finding that solution yet. )

    • KOZMOGRAF/X motion & design

      Sorry guys, I just noticed my editing error in the first sentence. It should read “with your registry modification,…). Whatever… MY TABLET WORKS! :)

  • hernan

    hi. Is there a chance to make run an artpad II serial in windows 8 ? I couldn’t with a manhattan usb-rs232 cable up to now. thank you so much.
    I already put the registry key …

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