It's time I replaced my laptop. My Toshiba Tecra 9000 is starting to suffer. It's a 1.2Ghz PIIIM with 768Mb of Ram. It originally came with Win2K, I went through upgrade hell waiting for drivers as XP came along. Its been to three continents, it travels over two hundred miles a day, and spends a couple hours every day in my rucksack. I don't think it will take Vista as it really needs it S3 display drivers and the Vista upgrade assistant reports them as incompatible. More telling it just won't do rendering at any decent pace. It struggles with Sim City 4.
But what to buy? Does that just sound like the wrong question? It is. Lets start with some requirements.
- Form factor
- Weight is less of an issue, as I currently have two batteries and anything I buy will be lighter. Both batteries are fading so give me a total of 2 hours total.
- Build quality and durability is important. It's got to last a tough lifetime, it doesn't have to be a ToughBook though. Just five years of use, not abuse.
- Vista
- There's a whole new host of search functionality I can't wait to get my hands on. For years I've played with an application but what lets it down is having a corpus to work against.
- It looks pretty.
- More power
- I use VS2005 a lot. I wait for VS2005 to compile a lot. More CPU power please, oh and can I have a 7200rpm drive instead of a 5400rpm too.
- Better screen real estate
- Did I mention VS2005. This is a good example of an app that likes to pack in more onto the screen, and basically I'd like to run a higher resolution (although I may up the DPI if it's too small).
- Not make my RSI any worse.
- I don't have an RSI condition, at least it's not been diagnosed. I do have a bone spur on the back of each of my hands, and my wrists can hurt when I use my laptop in an awkward position. That all said, I'd like to be able to use a computer in an alternate configuration. Maybe a pen interface.
So what is there
The tablet element is the part that reduces the field quite nicely, there are only
Asus R1 Tablet PC, Fujitsu LifeBook T4215, HP Pavilion tx1000z, Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC, Toshiba Portege M400, Compaq TC4400 Tablet PC, Toshiba Portege R400
So lets reduce some from the list straight off.
Toshiba Portege R400 - not enough CPU power, its a Core Duo U2500 1.2 GHz
HP Pavilion tx1000z - Build is mostly plastic, some flex in parts
Fujitsu LifeBook T4215 - Dodgy keyboard
Now lets consider the screen
Compaq TC4400 Tablet PC - only 1024x768 but has T7200 2.0GHz
Asus R1 Tablet PC - 13.3" wide-screen at 1280x800 WXGA and only T5500 1.6GHz CPU. Reports suggest lots of Vista driver issues.
Which brings us to CPU
Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC - L2500 1.83GHz and 1400x1050 SXGA+. This is tempting, build quality is high, and performance is close.
And that only leaves
Toshiba Portege M400 available as M400-146 with 1400x1050 SXGA+ and T7200 2.0GHz.
But there is just one minor problem, there could be a successor to Toshiba M400 coming...