Windows Vista - and on a tablet PC

[Ian]

I've gone and upgraded my ancient Sony Vaio PictureBook laptop to a HP Pavilion tx1030ea, one of the new HP tx1000 Vista tablet notebook range.

Unlike most previous tablet PCs, most tx1000s (not all) have an 'passive' contact-sensitive 'touch' screen. Think of a touch-screen PDA and scale it up to a 12.1 inch 1280x800 resolution screen.

So it's not a Wacom-style 'active' arrangement, that requires a special pen/stylus. This has good and bad points; I never got on with the Wacom-style pen/tablet arrangement (actually more so on tablets than tablet PCs to be honest) as I found it disconcerting that the pointer moves even when the pen isn't touching the screen.

In theory, you should be able to use your finger (not just a fingernail) to click on buttons and move windows and other objects, but I haven't figured out how to enable that yet.

Of course, if you lose your stylus pen, you can use a generic one and there is no major expense in replacing it as you would have with an active type. But then again, there is no facility for pressure sensitivy (variable density in drawing and painting), which artists would need, nor a handy eraser function by reversing your active pen. Neither of these points concern me.

I'm having a few teething problems with the pen for writing and drawing as the 'contact' can skip for no apparent reason. But it seems to work really well for Photoshop work, doing selections for example.

The screen does suffer quite a lot of reflections and it is slightly grainy, but I can live with that.

The tx1000 was designed for Windows Vista (I'm running Vista Home Professional) and I have to say I am mightily impressed with the 'coolness' of Vista. But hand on heart, I'd have to say that it's only marginally improved my work efficiency. But it really is cool - Star Trek Next Generation effects have finally arrived!

My tx1030ea has an AMD Turion X2 TL52 (1.6GHz, 2x 512MB cache) dual core CPU, so not as fashionable as Intel Core 2 Duo, but I don't have any performance complaints. 2GB RAM is fitted.

I've installed Photoshop CS3 beta and LightRoom 1.0 trial - no problems at all. Installing QuickTime was problematical (you need to sign the vbscript.dll system file manually - a known Vista issue), but that's fixed now.

So I'm happy, with a powerful and up to date small and quite light (1.9kg) laptop.

Ian

PS £999 fromn John Lewis here in the UK; and they include a second year's warranty FOC.

[P8RSON]

In theory, you should be able to use your finger (not just a fingernail) to click on buttons and move windows and other objects, but I haven't figured out how to enable that yet.

Hello Ian,
Unfortunately you won't be able to use a finger to control the screen input.
The HP's digitizer is extremely tight, disregarding anything larger than 5 pixels in width.

This is to ensure the screen does not suffer from the 'vector effect' (placing the palm of the hand on the screen, with vectoring the cursor jumps to your palm).

Good pricing from John Lewis ~ I wasn't aware they were selling the TX1000 yet.

[Ian]

Yes, I've worked that one out now of course. I think John Lewis had only had stock in for a couple of days - they hadn't even been trained up on the tx1030. Battery life remains a bit disappointing. Spent this morning using it exclusively in tablet mode using the four cell battery and the standard power save mode but only got 80 minutes use. So much for 3 + 4.5 hours for both batteries! I think I can extend that a fair bit for plain word processing and a reduced screen brightness, we'll see on Sunday as I will write up my Focus show report on the train home.

Ian

[StuartR]

I regularly get 4.5 - 5 hours out of my tc4400 tablet's battery with lightish use (note-taking during meetings plus a short slide-show for example), I have the power management configured for minimum drain obviously. I'm convinced that regularly going through the discharge / recharge cycle helps - especially if done when the batteries are new so I quite often run the tablet on batteries even when I'm in the office.

Corporate IT won't let me run Vista though, "at least until SP1 is out" they said. Pussies . I'm working on it though, I feel the need to test some of our in-house applications to make sure they work OK under Vista - you never know we might need to make some significant mods

[P8RSON]

Stuart,
Actually it is not recommended to continuously run the batteries through it's complete energy cycle.
Although it may go against the grain in why bother having a battery if you can not use it's full capacity, it is found that continuously draining the battery does more harm than good.
See here for further information.

[StuartR]

That's odd, I replied to this thread last week but I can't see my post. Perhaps I didn't press the right button or something

Anyway, thanks for the link - an interesting read.

I didn't mean to give the impression that I always allowed my batteries to drain fully before recharging, the use of the word "regularly" meant perhaps once a week, not every time I use it. More often than not the period off mains is 1 to 2 hours so it's a partial discharge.

The point I was trying to make is that "using" a laptop's battery regularly seems to enhance run-time compared to continuously using the mains supply and then expecting a decent run-time the one time in 6 months that the laptop is used on batteries alone.

Many of my colleagues, who use mains supply almost exclusively, seem to get about 20 minutes out of their their laptop batteries when forced to use them whereas I normally fair significantly better and I put this down to my "regular exercise" regime for the battery in my laptop.

All just my experience & opinion - not scientific at all