Second try on this. I don’ mind people critiquing my posts; I learn from it.
Just so that I get everything right as far as terms for
various pen and digitizer technologies go. And some history
along the way
AES (Active Electrostatic)
Also known as
Finepoint, later Wacom Finepoint. It requires a battery in the
pen and is known as “active”.
From about 2005 to 2018 I got a lot of experience with Gateway 2-in-1
twist into tablet laptops. The first was the M285C, whose “active” pen
battery recharged by an inductive coil built into the pen “garage” on
the computer.
G-way also sold these as CX models. The M285C was a special build
known as CX120, intended for students
Having inductive charging for pen batteries on board
the PC was a nifty idea, but turned into a disaster.
If a user left the pen "garaged’ for a long time, the
battery overcharged, overheated, leaked, corroded
connections and other stuff. Huge wave of failed pens,
unhappy people, general bad news for the company.
(Anyone here experience that?)
HP and others may have gone through something
similar on their TouchSmart 2-in-1 convertibles.
Gateway then hurriedly ditched the AES Wacom
Finepoint battery tech and switched to pens
using EMR (ElectroMagnetic Resonance) that
didn’t need a battery.
I think that tech was called Wacom Penabled and
then Wacom FeelIt (?)
The M295C follow-on had the non-battery pens and worked pretty well.
I think I got this correct. However, feel free to add or critique
I bought these old computers cheap secondhand on E-Bay,
and ended up with way too many useless machines.
Each time the stylus died, I thought it was the compute.,
Switched to the 295s, but Found that the Gateway cooling
system couldn’t cope with our summer weather (often over
110 and as high as 117) The Gateways would (temporarily) roll
over and die.
It was no good having a working stylus on the machine
if I had to wait for it to cool down and, re-boot every
few hours.
So the Toughbooks. But now I’m faced with the
original dilemma, which is I still can’t do sketching
on a computer screen the way I’d like.
Aren’t GETACs basically similar to Toughbooks?
MPP is “Microsoft Pen Protocol” used to control the Surface Pens
Surface sounds cool, but the hardware looks fragile; I’m just afraid
that it wouldn’t survive up here. Hence the T-Books.
Although they also seem to have their issues. Sigh.
Thank you, @JoeS, for the MPP info and the corrections. R-cat