Web Log

It’s not written in stone…

My latest toy is a new laptop: an HP Presario tx2000. It’s a little notebook. My business is really picking up — I’ve been having a lot more meetings lately, and I’ll be attending some events this year — so I wanted something nice and portable.

Now, the tx2000 isn’t exactly a powerhouse (a dual-core processor would have been nice), but with 3 GB RAM and decent stats across the board, it certainly gets the job done. My more resource-intensive work (that is, playing video games) will stay on my desktop.

But the tx2000 is a Tablet PC, and that’s something new for me. I’ve never owned or used a tablet before, so it’s a fun little addition. I doubt I’ll use the feature seriously, but I could see a few uses for it (If only to play some casual games with the stylus on a flight or train ride.) I hear that there are better tablets out there, but for its price (this was just under $1000 CAD at Staples) it’s not half-bad. The Wacom-powered screen has some nice features that are surprisingly intuitive.

I must say, the built-in interpereter is remarkably good at reading bad writing (click to enlarge):

I especially like the ability to scribble over your writing to erase it.

Among the features of this notebook are the built-in webcam, media remote and all the standards like wi-fi and DVD writing. The dual headphone jacks are also nice — my wife and I can now choose our own in-flight movies when travelling.

On the other side of the coin, the most annoying feature of this notebook is the placement of the Shift and Enter keys. Rather than having long versions of either key, the Enter key is vertically placed beside one backslash (’\') key, while the left-side shift key is very small (about 3/4 width of a letter key) and tucked behind another backslash key. So basically, I’m typing backslashes whenever I reach for Shift or Enter — often enough to be annoying. This placement may be unique to Canadian versions of this laptop, since those dual backslash keys have other uses on the French Canadian layout. I’ll need to get used to this.

Other than that, I haven’t had any problems yet. It’s been reasonably quick, the built-in webcam is of decent quality and everything seems to work as it should. The battery life could stand to be longer, and other than being an affordable tablet PC, it’s not really remarkable. But for a good price and weighing in under 5 pounds, it does everything a notebook should.

UPDATE: This computer isn’t really working for me anymore.  I’m not sure if mine is a dud or not, but it’s freezing and/or going to the blue screen daily now.  I’m in the process of trying to return it, but it looks like I might be stuck with the annoying repair and eventual replacement process.  Oh well.

June 11th, 2008 in Work. 2 Comments »

Colin Temple is a web publisher in Ottawa, Canada. This site is © 2008 him.