I was looking around at the ultra-portable PC market when I stumbled across a special offer on the iGo Stowaway Ultra-Slim Bluetooth Keyboard. This is a wireless keyboard that can connect to my Orange SPV M600 by bluetooth. As my phone comes with Windows Mobile 5 and has the mobile office stuff, I saw great opportunity for writing longer emails and little documents too. I ordered it from Expansys and due to the recent Industrial Action at the Royal Mail, it took a few days to arrive.

Once paired up with my phone it worked ok, but I had a few problems with the latest drivers. You can install the drivers direct to the device by browsing to the thinkoutside site, but these didn’t work. I got errors in a couple of places. The install would start up, the progress bar would go along 5 blocks and then would bomb out with the error “Stowaway XT Setup – Install Failed” and bang. This I cured by checking the install log in the volatile subdirectory, and then manually deleting the stowaway files from the windows directory. I really do not like deleting files that way as you can totally mangle windows by playing around with dlls. Once I got the driver to install I then had a problem on restart – i.e. the driver would not initialise on the device with “The Keyboard driver (“StowawayXT.dll”) is not responding. please reinstall”. Any attempt to reinstall gave the above problem.

I eventually fixed it by going back in versions from the current version. Searching around the internet I found a support posting on one of the Expansys forums that pointed back to previous drivers which appear to be a version before the latest. Having cleared out the stowaway files from the windows directory, the driver loaded in ok.