HP Pavilion TX1000 Entertainment Notebook PC en route ...

It's been a while since I got a new piece of hardware to play with, and very shortly I should receive a new HP TX1000 Tablet PC (which oddly bears no Tablet PC branding) to run through the ringer. Big shout out to Chris at AMD who worked out the details for me, after hearing what a big fan I was of the Tablet concept.

I'll give you a bit of the "out of the box experience" in terms of how the pre-load runs, then I'll load it up with my standard config and see if it holds up to my work and school schedules. I love my Tecra M4, and it'll be interesting to see how a smaller unit puts up with me. This won't be your typical review, but it'll give you an pretty good picture of how this machine lives up to the expectations of a serious tablet user.

The new machine should be here sometime today, so expect some first impressions this afternoon. I've heard Andru over at GearLive should be getting an identical unit around the same time, and I'm sure he'll have all the great unboxing shots and that sort of thing, but maybe I'll have a few as well.

Fair Disclosure: This laptop is a "loaner" and will not be kept by me unless I pay for it in some fashion, unlike the "free" laptops some bloggers received a few months back when Vanishing Point began. Should this change, for example, HP decides to let me keep it (highly unlikely), I will make a full post disclosing the fact.

Update: The Tablet is actually arriving Tuesday morning, so the first impressions will be delayed a pit. Patience, grasshopper.

Vista RTM buggier than RC2?

I've had the RTM version of Windows Vista on my Toshiba Tecra M4 for about a week now. Strangely, I'm having issues with the machine that didn't happen in RC2. I think it's all traceable to the nVidia video driver, which was updated through Windows Update right after the install completed. I'm getting massive video corruption coming out of sleep mode (making the machine unusable), to the point where I now have to hibernate the machine instead of sleep.

I can't exactly fault Microsoft for this, except that the driver came through Windows Update, so it should have been checked for issues like this before it was released. Hopefully this can be sorted out before the widespread release in January.

Windows Vista ReadyBoost on a Tecra M4

I've been running Windows Vista (Build 5728) on my Tecra M4 Tablet PC for a little over a week now, and I'm pretty impressed with how they've implemented the Tablet PC features. The whole system feels a little better put together than the XP and Tablet stuff that Toshiba had loaded. Could be that it's just the niceties of having a clean install, though. Still a few bugs (the Tablet does NOT like being put into sleep or hibernate while in Portrait mode), but overall, I'm very impressed. Resume from hibernate is snappy enough where I might just use that instead of Sleep.

Office 2007 (Beta 2 Technical Refresh) runs very well on Vista. I love how great all of my work looks, but I'm already starting to pine for the day that everyone's work looks just as good as mine. It's just so effortless to make quality documents and charts. I'm going to need to find some documentation on how to create my own themes, so that I have a look that's all my own. That'll also be handy for keeping documents limited to company-approved fonts and colors as well.

One thing I've been wanting to try out is ReadyBoost, a feature that uses flash memory to speed disk access (sort of like a tertiary cache, after CPU cache and RAM). I've got an SD card slot built into the machine, and I was surprised to see ReadyBoost offered as an option when I stuck an old 256MB SD card in there. Sadly, it wasn't fast enough to use the feature. I'd much rather use the SD slot than a USB stick poking out (especially since I use USB for other things).

Any Tecra M4 owners out there running Vista know of a brand/model of SD card that works with ReadyBoost? Please let me know ... I don't relish the idea of just randomly testing cards until I find one that works. According to Microsoft, you should have at least a 1:1 ratio of ReadyBoost to RAM, so I'm looking at either a 2GB or 4GB card.

School has started again at the UW, and this being my senior year, I'm going to be incredibly busy. I can't wait to be done; it seems like I've been at this grind forever. It'll be nice not having the UW suck a couple grand out of my wallet every few months, too.