New Tablet PC

I’ve been somewhat irritated (ok, that’s not really true, I’ve been mad as He*&) with my work laptop, and given the frustrations that I’ve put the IT guys through over it, I decided that I was just going to go out and buy my own. I don’t really need the mobile workstation power that a lot of people want. I just basically need my Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 toolset, and of course email and PowerPoint. (Also OneNote, I am addicted to OneNote)

Well, I was in Costco yesterday and noticed that they had an excellent price (under USD$1000) for an HP Pavilion tx2513cl Tablet. It’s a 2Ghz AMD Turion Dual Core processor, with ATI Radeon graphics and a whole bunch of consumer-related features, including a media center remote and a Lightscribe dvd burner. All in all, I am normally concerned with consumer-level products, but with Costco’s liberal return policy I figured I had nothing to lose.

After removing all the crapware (by simply wiping the disk and reinstalling x64 Vista Ultimate (yeah, I know, I would have loved to put Server 2008 on it, but it’s a tablet!) and getting everything setup, the box looks like it is going to solve my needs just fine! The “Experience Index” on the box is 3.7, and it seems to load Visual Studio Team System 2008 just fine…

Gotta say, I love it so far. We will see how it goes over the next few weeks. I was considering buying a MacBook, but I really wanted a tablet….