It occured to me that in all my panic about my old computer crashing, I never posted about my new computer!

As many of you know, I went to undergraduate school at Wake Forest University, and they are nationally known for their excellent technology program, particularly for the fact that upon entering the school, every student and faculty member receive an IBM ThinkPad. Upon entering their junior year, all the students trade in their ThinkPad for a newer model, and when they graduate, they get to take it with them.

I recently started graduate school at the Babcock School of Management at Wake Forest. The majority of the people in my program went to Wake Forest undergrad, and when we were told we would be receiving a new computer upon entering this program, we all assumed we were getting the newest ThinkPad.

Not so.

Day one of orientation, and the IT department rolls in with these babies.

It’s a Convertible Notebook, which basically means it’s a laptop, but if you swivel the screen around, it’s a tablet. It’s pretty cool. So far the tablet has been useful for taking notes in class, especially in classes like accounting where I have to draw graphs from time to time.

It’s also a fast little bugger - waaaaaaaay faster than the ThinkPad. That makes me happy, because I HATED how slow that computer was. From day one it was slow.

Downside - there’s a ton of stuff running in the background. It doesn’t run on regular Windows XP Professional or Home or anything . . . it has it’s own XP Tablet Edition, which means there are some additional software features that are running on the computer that area always running.

I haven’t fully decided if I like it or not. There are a lot of features that I do like (the graphics card is pretty decent, and I LOVE the widescreen monitor - that is something I will never go back from), but it is kind of funny to get used to it. Plus, I couldn’t get too excited about it at first because I was so bummed about the crash of the old computer.

So, that’s my newest toy. Does anyone else have a tablet (of any kind)? Any tips or horror stories?