Peter Rysavy's Lonestar screenshots and discussion: Microsoft handed out Lonestar alphas at the Tablet PC get-together at Comdex. Oh man, I should have listened to that little voice in my head that told me to go to Vegas. Most interestingly, Peter says that Lonestar is a small (~10MB), user-installable and uninstallable upgrade that runs absolutely fine on first-generation hardwares. Essentially, it sounds like a case where resource tradeoffs had resulted in more effort on OS and hardware foundations for the release of XP Tablet edition 1.0 and that Longhorn is the result of a significant amount of those resources shifting towards handwriting and user-experience. Plus, it stands to reason that the number of people with a deep, low-level understanding of the Tablet OS has increased hugely over the past year, so it's not surprising that there could be, for instance, significant improvements in handwriting recognition on existing hardware.