Tablet for 3D CAD, Notes, Travel on a tight budget.

[superart]

General Questions.

1. What is your budget?
$200

2. Would you consider purchasing used/refurbished?
Yes

3. Do you prefer a Slate, Convertible or Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC)?
Convertible

4. What size Tablet PC would you prefer?

Small and light ~ 5" to 8.9"
Compact ~ 10"
Mainstream ~ 12.1"
Large ~ 13.3"



5. Which country do you intent to purchase from?
USA

6. Do you have any preferences to brand loyalty or dislikes?
not sony

7. How many hours battery life do you require?
As much as possible, but if it comes to a trade off between performance vs. battery, I am willing to compromise on battery

8. What will be the primary usage scenario of this tablet? (Email/Web Surfing/Drawing/Word Processing/Entertainment/Notetaking etc)
In order of importance: SolidWorks (3D CAD), Email/web, note taking, netflix, MS office

9. Do you have an OS preference?
Windows 7 pro

10. What software and tasks do you intend to run? (Microsoft Office or other Word Processing Suite/Photoshop/3D Studio Max/Autocad etc)
In order of importance: SolidWorks (3D CAD), Email/web, note taking, netflix, MS office

10. Do you intend on playing Games? If so please list.
maybe a little, mostly casual gaming



Screen Specifics

1. What resolution do you prefer?

XGA - 1024x768 ~ large and easy to read text and graphic icons but you fit less on the screen.
SXGA - 1400x1050 ~ Small text and graphic icons which require good vision but the gain is a much larger screen. (no longer available new, must look for used or refurbished machines)
WXGA - 1280x768 ~ has a wider usable area than XGA, ideal for viewing Spreadsheets and other programs that require desktop space. The mainly used resolution for new tablet PCs since 2008.
WXGA


2. Do you require the screen to be readable in sunlight?
See the above linked FAQ for guidance
Would be nice if it was.

3. Do you prefer your display to be glossy or matte?
matte, but I could live with a glossy if I have to.

4. Do you require Touch? (without pressure sensitivity) (Which one: resistive or capacitive)
See the above linked FAQ for guidance
Preferably with multi-touch if possible

5. Do you require a Pen? (with pressure sensitivity) (Which one: Wacom or N-Trig)
See the above linked FAQ for guidance
Preferably wacom


Component Specifics

1. What size Hard Drive and Memory do you require?
I guess about 100GB, I could always upgrade down the road if needed.

2. Do you require an Optical (CD/DVD) Drive to be built in?
Would be nice to have.

3. Do you require ability to add a second Battery or Hard Drive (Modular Bay technology)?
Would be nice to have a second battery.




OK, so I'm going to be doing some traveling this summer, so I will need a laptop to do my work while I am out and about. I do a lot of CAD work on SolidWorks, so I think that is the main thing. It is not an extremely processor intensive application, but it does need a lot of RAM and video acceleration would be a huge benefit.

I would like something with a screen that is large enough to do actual real work, but still relatively portable. I'm thinking 12-13". 14" would be good too.

One thing is, I am tight on money right now. I wouldn't be getting a new PC at all if I didn't absolutely need it, but I do, so the search is on. I have a budget of about $200 max. I would greatly appreciate any help.

So far I have looked at the HP TX2000 and the HP TC4400.
I am kind of leaning towards the TX2000 at this point. I like the fact that it has discrete graphics and TWO speakers. Really, unless its a transistor radio from 1952 there is no excuse for for having only 1 speaker. That's just ridiculous.

I will probably have to upgrade to 4GB of RAM once I get it, regardless of what tablet I ultimately decide to go with.

I'd appreciate any advice or input you guys can give me. if there are other good tablets in my price range that I have overlooked, please let me know as well. I am open minded to just about anything.

Thanks.

[superart]

I've been doing a little more searching and shopping around.

I actually started bidding on a Tx2000, then found out about all the issues. Luckily, I got outbid on that one, and seems like I dodged a bullet.

Right now I am looking into getting a Fujitsu T4220. The one I am looking at has a 2.2GHz T7500 CPU. I also found a local mom-n-pop computer store that has a few HP TC4400 systems. They seem similarly speced. Both have core-2 Duo, 80 GB hard drive, 2GB RAM. The HP TC4400 is about $80 cheaper.

I like that the T4220 has stereo speakers, so I am leaning towards that, but on the other hand I wouldn't mind saving the $80 and picking it up locally either. Is there anything that would make one better than the other for my applications? How does the pen compare between the T4220 and TC4400? Which one has the better screen? I'd greatly appreciate any comments or advice.

[superart]

OK, so I finally pulled the trigger on the Fujitsu T4220. I saw a pretty good deal on ebay for it. $225 shipped. I was at work, and it said the guy had "over 10 units available". By the time I got to my place and logged on, it said only 8 available, so I snapped one up. Now it says 7 available, and the price is a couple bucks more.

I'm also getting 4GB of RAM from newegg as well.

One question I have is, has anyone used the MoGo mouse? I think it's a really cool idea. Ita a little mouse that folds up and fits into the PCMCIA slot. Then when you want to use it, it slides out and is almost full size. Does anyone have any experience with this little guy?

Thanks.

[Agent 9]

It should be enough of a machine to handle what you are going to be doing, especially for the price. I would recommend taking a look at this if you are thinking of replacing the thermal paste/ CPU or whatever Disassembly of the Fujitsu LifeBook T4200 Series Tablet PC

And there are ongoing discussions about upgrading T4220's here Upgrade Advice for a T4220 lots of interesting things brought up, some of it may even be useful to you.


As for that MoGo mouse, I saw that quite a while back when I go my M1400, but decided against it because while small [perhaps too small and not solid] it is a Bluetooth wireless mouse; it needs to charge up from time to time, and the computer would need to be on for that as the slot doesn't get powered when its off or in sleep -I think- and then you have to have Bluetooth on and working which is a battery drain, on top of that Bluetooth mice always tend to not be smooth operating. but for $20 you may want to give it a go... I just carry my Logitech G500 with me if I need a mouse, for me its great because it fits my large hands quite well, is weighted (changeable), has programmable buttons that program onto the mouse, and 5 sensitivity levels you can set

[superart]

OK, so my cool new tablet came this past Saturday. Overall, I really like it. I like the screen. Although, it does have some flex and quite a bit of dust under the screen.

I know the dust is a common issue with this chassis. I will have to read up on that a bit. Really though, it doesn't seem to bother me as much as I thought it would. Maybe it's because my phone has had dust under its screen since Iv'e gotten it. I took my phone back after about 20 days because of the dust and the replacement had the same problem, so I just kept it and have had it for the Past 3 or 4 years. Interestingly enough, I recently wound up working with one of the mechanical designers that designed my phone, I couldn't resist mentioning the problem to him ;-).

I can't seem to tell if I have a screen protector on, or if that's part of the wacom system. It does have what looks like remnants of an old screen protector along the edges. I'll just have to clean that off carefully when I get the chance.

The system came preinstalled with vista and 2 gigs of RAM. I haven't gotten a chance to install Win7 or the 4 gigs of RAM yet.

I really enjoy the pen interface. In fact, I'm using it right now to write this post. There are sometimes problems recognizing my handwriting, but in fairness, I do hare less than neat chicken scratch. Perhaps it will be even better when I install windows 7.

I have run into one showstopper. I'm pretty sure there is a setting that I can set to fix this, I just need to find it. The problem is, there is no middle-click. There is left-click and right-click with the pen, but no middle. There are 2 buttons on the pen (plus the "eraser"). One button is left-click, the other does nothing. If there is a way to make that other button do middle-click, I would be golden. The middle-click is critical for me. In SolidWorks, I use it as much or even more than the left-click. Without middle-click, I cant use SolidWorks at all, and that's not an option.

Another thing I was looking forward to is the scroll feature on the finger print reader. Unfortunately, this wound up being a bit disappointing. It either doesn't scroll at all, or it will suddenly jerk the page down. It is not fluid at all. I hope there is some kind of fix for this. SolidWorks uses the scroll a lot to zoom in / out on models. I would really like to have this functionality if possible.

As far as battery, I am pretty satisfied. I get about 1.5-2 hours while doing web browsing with Youtube or watching Netflix. Not super fantastic, but satisfactory. It's about what I expected.

Overall I am happy & satisfied with my purchase. I definitely feel it was/is worth the money that that I paid.

I will be sure to update as I become more used to the computer and after I make the RAM and OS upgrades. If anyone can help me with the middle-click and scroll issues, I would greatly appreciate it.

[stoneseeker]

I'm pretty sure there is a setting that I can set to fix this, I just need to find it. If there is a way to make that other button do middle-click, I would be golden.

Heyhey Congrats on your purchase, let us know how that little guy handles Solidworks.

As far as the settings go, I am assuming you installed the wacom drivers for your unit? There is typically a tablet PC wacom driver that you either download off Fujitsu site, or get off wacom site. If you have done this, go to the Wacom folder in your start programs and select wacom properties. In there, under the pen tab, you can assign different functions to the two side buttons, as well as tweak the pressure settings, etc etc.

Hope that helps!

[superart]

Thanks for the tip.

I checked the Fujitsu driver page. The only driver that seemed relevant was called "Pentablet". I tried running it, but the only thing that came up would be a blank command prompt screen. Sometimes I would get a self-extracting zip window come up with an error message saying that it cant install the files, restart and try again. No matter how many times I would restart, it would just do the same thing.

On the wacom website, I found the driver for TabletPC. I installed it and was able to map the button on the pen to middle click, so thats great!! thanks.

However, after installing the Wacom software, the responsiveness of the pen was greatly deteriorated. 60% of the time when I tap with the pen, it registers as a double-click. Also, when I hover over the screen with the pen, the courser jitters. When I try to write, it the lines come up as zig-zags. handwriting is almost impossible, since it comes up as zig-zag lines. I'm actually typing this post on the keyboard because I couldn't do the handwriting. Do you know how I can fix this? Will installing Windows7 solve the problem?

Thanks,
--Art.