Much Love for Tablets!

Towards of November of this past year, I finally got fed up with my "dinosaur" laptop. I got it in May of 2006, on sale for $1200 CAD. It had a 120 Gb hard drive, and 1 Gb of RAM, and runs Windows XP Media Edition. It's an HP dvc4000. Since then, the hard drive crashed, and I got a new 160 Gb one, because I really want to get my pictures off of the old one, if nothing else. I have pictures from a trip I took to Alaska on there, that were never backed up, but that's another story. So, when I got fed up, I went out and bought an HP tx2000 tablet laptop I'd been eyeing. It was $999.99 CAD, with 4 Gb dual-channel RAM, and a 320 Gb hard drive. It's got voice recognition, a built-in mic and webcam, among other features. I love it. Except I didn't know about the difference between 32-bit processors, and 64-bit processors, which has since given me a tiny bit of grief. I know that 64-bit is the way of the future, so hopefully I won't have to worry for much longer. For one thing, I can't get my Google side bar, with all of it's great gadgets. I'm stuck with Vista's low variety of gadgets. Another problem is that I can't use our newest printer with this computer, because I can't find the CD, and the website with the driver's supposedly has drivers for both 64-bit and 32-bit, but there is a problem on the website, that makes the 64-bit driver inaccessible.

Even though I do love the laptop, it's been making Mac's look more appealing to me, because my friend's Macintosh laptop is so much sturdier than my HP. For one thing, the monitor has a lot of room inside it's case, and if I put some pressure on it, I can feel it give a little, which worries me. Another problem is that my CD drive keeps falling out! I popped it out once, because I wasn't sure what the slider on the bottom did there, and once I'd seen that, I pushed it back in. A few months later, I'd shut down my laptop, and was turning it around to put in my bag, when the CD drive goes flying out, across an aisle in my lecture hall! I freaked out, but the only damage was a little dent on the corner of the door, that doesn't make a difference. Since then, the problem has happened a few times, and I've made a habit of always securing the CD drive by placing my hand over it when I move my laptop. My only other complaint is that it's malfunctioned on me before. Two days before I left for vacation in December, the keyboard and volume buttons on my laptop stopped working. I did chat with HP's tech support, uninstalled and redownloaded drivers, restarted and other things, but nothing worked. So I brought an external keyboard on vacation and they sent me a box for the laptop. I still haven't done anything with the box, although I probably should, but a Christmas miracle happened! I turned on my computer on Christmas day (5th day of the problem), and lo and behold, everything's functional! The only other time the keyboards done something, is once it stopped working when I took the laptop out of stand-by. I simply shut the laptop again and reopened it, and it was fine. And of course, the common problem of the keyboard language randomly switching to French. A few friends of mine as well as my dad have all had this problem with laptops running Vista. 

Over all, I don't think I'll be going back to normal laptops after this. And I really love the Wacom technology for the touch screen (I've heard some bad things about the digitizer on the tx2z model), it's got an eraser on the end of the stylus, and detects how much pressure you put on the screen. I'd just really love to see a sturdier design on the body. I really don't care if it's plain matte silver, at least my old laptop doesn't have scratches all over the top like this one (4 years vs 6 months!) and is still completely sturdy. HP, if you're listening, please, PLEASE go back to the older dv4000 style bodies for the laptops!