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Installation
The Griffin PowerMate can be installed and used
on a Windows and Mac computer. We tested the PowerMate on a Windows PC
running WinXP Pro. Installation was rather troublesome.
Spent quite a bit of time trying to get the drivers installed properly.
As with most USB devices, I like to install the drivers before plugging in the
device. Unfortunately, this didn't work very well. I then
attempted to install it by plugging in the device first. That did not
work well either.
When you plug the PowerMate into an available
USB slot, Windows XP immediately recognizes the device as "USB Human Interface
Device" and indicates that it as properly installed the new hardware. I
confirmed this by going into the device manager to make sure there weren't any
conflicts. All was going smoothly so far.
Inserting the included software CD will popup an
autorun menu to guide you through the driver installation.
The install program will check for any updates
prior to installation. No updates were needed as we were running their
most current driver version 1.5.2. Oddly, Windows did not prompt for a
reboot after the installation. I went ahead and rebooted anyways.
Once back in Windows, I went into the device manager to check for conflicts.
All was good. At this point I figured the device was installed correctly
but it actually wasn't. To sum it all up, I had to go into device
manager and manually update the driver and browse out to the proper directory
on the installation CD. This worked. I was now ready to play
with this cool glowing device that was sitting there on my desk just waiting
to be touched.
Functionality
The PowerMate control panel is where you'll
spend most of your time configuring the device to work according to your
needs. We will show you a few of the many things we configured the PowerMate
to do.
The drop down menu on the settings section is
where you will find some presets that are already installed which will allow
you to assign functions to Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
The Global Settings preset will allow you to configure global functions that
are not specific to a particular application.
Global Settings
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One example use of the Global Settings preset is
to launch a particular application. We configured the PowerMate to
launch Outlook by setting the user action in the Actions section to "Click"
then set the computer action to "Open File". You can then browse
out to the location of the Outlook executable file. Clicking on the
"Apply" button will immediately apply the changes. Pushing down on the PowerMate
would now launch Outlook.
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