Digital Cents

The no joy of new technology…

As part of a replacement for some stolen equipment, I just received two new Gateway M485-E Convertible Notebook pc’s. At first glance I was very excited! Core 2 Duo processor, 1gb of ram, 8 hr 1/2 cell main battery with thepossibility of adding a modular 8 cellfor a total of approximately 12-16 hours of battery, Tablet XP technology. Nice stuff. I was hoping to take one as a replacement for my Two year old M275 Gateway Tablet The earlier version. My M275 only has a 3 hour battery life. 

Overall, my first impression of the M285 was positive. Clean lines, nice bright active matrix Screen, great horsepower. The 14″ widescreen was nice. The weight was the same as my old tablet, but felt less cumbersome.

As soon as I took out the stylus my joy began to diminish. The stylus Gateway is now using is active sensing technology. Meaning that only the Gateway stylus will be reconignized by the M285. you might think that this is not a by deal until you lose one… Additionally, the styles and pointer never seem to align well regardless of how often I calibrate. This I found to be VERY annoying. However, I quickly put that issue aside as I began to use this machine. The speed and capabilities are amazing. My old m275 is peppy at 1.7GHz,but the Core 2 Duo running at 1.66GHz easily out paces it. I like to run a number of applications at one time. Typically, 5-7 or 8 and that is not including the background apps I have loaded in my tray like, skype, snag it, live care, pen flicks, etc. Not to mention the 4 to 5 IE windows (tabs) that I may have open if I am researching something on the internet. So, the added power would be welcome.

As you might be able to imagine I am pretty hard on systems. Additionally, I really love tablet technology! Most of what I do is pen based. Maybe Tablet technology will bring back handwriting skills?!

One other aspect I began to find distressing was that the M285-E didn’t want to accept Vista RC 2. It’s not that it is not capable… None of the RC2 DVD’s that I burned would be accepted as readable by the M285-E’s DVD drive… this was tragic to me. I have been using Vista since early in the beta and have grown to really like this OS. I was able to eventually load Vista RC1, however, then the M285-E forgot that it was a tablet… This was really annoying. Especially when RC1 would not Connect to windows Update to potentially download the missing tablet drivers…

So, Overall within one day, I re-imaged the M285-E four times to get it finally back to factory specs, and created (wasted) six DVD’s working to get a compatible DVD for RC2 and in the end I am back right where I started with an XP Pro based Tablet pc with a flawed stylus. I am going to wait until the Corporate Rtm version of Vista Releases next week to try again to make the M285-E a useful technology tool to replace my M275.

An interesting siderite… my M275 had no problems upgrading to any version of Vista and works almost flawlessly with RC 2. I only have a small problem with the internal mic. other than that this has been a great little Tablet! And it is still going!