Going convertible...
It's been a while sine I replaced my Thinkpad with the excellent DELL M90. You can read about that transition here.The DELL rocks, but it has a drawback that the Thinkpad didn't have. It's too big to move around the house. I'm a tech book junkie and spend quite some time reading tech books. Tech books also tend to be like bricks and they are not very comfortable to shlep around with you, let alone a few. Ever tried to take with you Petzold and Prosise for more than a few meters? Well, it's been quite a while since I picked up my copy of Petzold (I'm not complaining). To work around the weight issue and still have most of my tech books available I have been a subscriber to Safari for a couple of years. I like the service and I have access to most of the content either online or in downloadable PDFs. Since replacing the Thinkpad with the M90 my book collection has again moved a little out of reach.
So I decided to take a look at tablet PC offerings. I thought a tablet PC would be perfect since it would allow me to take media with me and it would also let me connect to our wireless home network. After a relatively short research I was left with two models to choose between.
- The thinkpad X60 with a Core Duo 1.83 2500L with 1GB of RAM and 80 GB 5400rpm HDD.
- The Fujitsu T4215 with a Core 2 Duo 1.66 with 1GB 512MB of RAM and 40GB 5400rpm HDD.
The Fujitsu is available with more memory and a faster CPU, but then the price was significantly higher than the Thinkpad. I made a few phone calls and couldn't find any store with a Fujitsu with Vista in stock. The waiting time would be more than a calendar month so I decided to see if I could get hold of a Thinkpad instead. I like the look of the Fujitsu more and the reviews on both models are excellent. The Fujitsu has an integrated DVD drive that the Thinkpad lacks so that was a plus for the Fujutsu as well. After only two phone calls I found a reseller with a Thinkpad X60 with Vista Business in stock. I didn't want to by an XP machine to be sure that I wouldn't run into some driver hell with a proprietary tablet.
5 hours later the Thinkpad landed on my doorstep and the first thing I did was to remove the memory and hard drive. (Replacing RAM and hard drive yourself does not void the warranty!) I got 2 GB of RAM that installed in a snap and I had a 100GB 7200rpm 2.5" hard drive available. The installation of the hard drive was also over in 5 minutes. It is the first time I've seen a hard drive in a rubber cover to keep it silent. Very nice! I did a clean install of Vista, downloaded the "online system update" from Lenovo and let it install a selected subset of system drivers to make the tablet usable as a tablet. The performance was great even with Aero Glass running.
I transferred my book collection to the tablet and sat down in my favorite chair. After a couple of chapters of "WPF Unleashed" my verdict was clear. Tablet PCs rock!