Eric Mack On-Line

Several people have written to share that, as a result of my blog, they have purchased a Tecra M4. One friend even surprised me with an announcement of his new M4 acquisition. (More on that soon.) This past week, I've demonstrated the M4 to numerous clients as well as people who come up and say "that's really neat; what is it?" As far as I know, I've apparently helped sell another ten M4's for Toshiba and at least as many licenses of OneNote, MindManager and other Tablet-related software.

I've been working with document management on the Tablet PC. Scanning books and documents for review on the Tablet seems to work well and, despite the weight and size of the unit, I really enjoy the large screen. (I would not switch back.) As I explained to someone today, since I can display a page in a window on the left and run MindManager or OneNote in a page on the right, I'm quite content to carry around a large Tablet.

I continue to enjoy the Tablet PC and the M4, well mostly. To be fair, four  items remain on my persistent tablet problems list.

1. Wireless conflicts - It seems there's disagreement between Windows XP Tablet Edition, the Intel PROSet Wireless Client, and the Toshiba Config-Free drivers as to who should get control of the wireless card. If I leave things alone for ten minutes the drivers seem to sort things out. Still, a big inconvenience. Ultimately, only the Intel PROSet application works.

2. M4 Goes into a standby or hibernate and I cannot get out of it except to power cycle. I still cannot explain this one.

3. At times, tablet goes into snail mode. I still suspect a power management or Intel Speed-step issue, particularly with pen mode. (The fixes I've tried don't seem to help.) Unfortunately, I have no time to reload until the end of June, so I'll continue to limp along. (For now, I'm  only run in high-power mode, which means that battery life is terrible.)

4. Most of my attempts to hibernate result in a windows error indicating that insufficient system resources exist to complete the operation.

These seem like issues with the Tablet OS, or perhaps a hardware conflict. I realize that problems 2-4 may also be due to software that I've installed; we'll see. Hopefully, my experiences are unique. I certainly hope so.

My friend, Michael Sampson, who's here with me, thinks this is hilarious and reminds me that I could have bought a Mac.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm down on the Tablet PC or Toshiba; I'm not. At this point, I have no plans to go back to a laptop only.  Still, since people seem to be relying on my blog for product information, I want to be honest about my experience thus far, sharing both the good and the bad.

Until I get these problems sorted out, I cannot consider whether or not I'm YABHTU, but I remain very optimistic.

I know that many of my clients read this blog and have been following my Tablet PC pursuit. I want to get through the initial start-up process so that I will be better equipped to evaluate and recommend this technology to these clients in the future.