After months of research, the time was right. Lenovo was having a nice St. Patrick's Day sale on their notebooks, my wife's old 866mhz P3 was showing its age and my 4 1/2 year-old Thinkpad (while still working fine) was just too slow to be useful for any development.
I've jumped into the Tablet PC arena! I'm a big note taker/scribbler. I'm not one to "take notes" on a computer. I use pen & paper to draw circles, squares and arrows to connect notes I'm scribbling down. I fill up a notepad in about 2 months. Going back and finding old notes is a pain when you have to flip through pages. I want to start organizing all of this and I see the tablet as a good start.
So last Friday, I ordered a Lenovo X60 Tablet. I started with the base SXGA+ configuration (1400 x 1050 vs. the XGA at 1024 x 768) and then did a little upgrading:
Hard Drive
I went with the slightly larger 80GB hard drive (still only 5400 RPM though). My old Thinkpad had a 60GB hard drive and I never really put more than about 40 - 50 GB on it. As this will be my primary machine, I went a little bigger. I've got some external USB drives that will hold the really big stuff (like digital video that has yet to be edited).
RAM
The system comes pre-configured with two 512MB DIMMs. I paid $10 extra to have a single 1GB DIMM. When I decide to upgrade to 2GB, I only need to buy a single 1GB DIMM and snap it in. This will be much cheaper than the $180 Lenovo was offering to put two 1GB DIMMs in the machine.
Ultrabase
I got the Ultrabase (docking station) and a DVD-ROM drive (the Lenovo tablet does not include a DVD drive). While I'm used to working on laptop keyboards (and IBM/Lenovo's are very nice!), I still prefer my desktop keyboard with fingerprint reader and multimedia controls. Plus I've got a nice 17" Samsung LCD display!
Battery
I upgraded to the longer-lasting 8-cell battery. With integrated WiFi, I plan on being untethered quite a bit and wanted a battery that could last.
OS
I paid $20 extra to go with Windows XP Tablet Edition. "What?!", you ask. "No Vista? You actually paid extra for Windows XP Tablet Edition?!". Yes, I did. Here's why: I need to know that all of the apps I currently run will operate without a problem on the tablet PC. This is going to be my "main" machine. Once I get the tablet set up and have migrated all of my necessary files to it, my 1.8GHZ desktop machine goes to my wife. Sure, it'll be about 10 feet away from me, but my wife uses her computer a lot (which helped increase the WAF on the tablet since she was still using my previous desktop -- an old 866mhz P3). I can't assume that if I have a problem with a piece of software under Vista that I can spin my chair around and start using her machine. Vista is new and I've read about lots of issues -- especially with Tablets. Sure, I've read a ton of good stuff about the improvements in Vista for Tablet PC's and I'm excited those features will be there when I decide to upgrade. But for now, I need something rock solid that will run my current stuff without problems -- and that is Windows XP.
Now I just need to wait. The expected ship date is March 30th. With any luck, I'll have it the first week of April!
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Tablet PC