My current preferred PC is a specced out Toshiba Portege M400. It's Core Duo, 4GB of RAM, two 7200 RPM disks, and a high res (1400x1050) screen. All in a compact 12" form factor, and it's a Tablet PC as well.

Recently Avanade upgraded my work-supplied laptop to a Dell Latitude D830, which also has pretty mean specifications: Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB of RAM, a 1920x1200 display, and it also has two 160GB disks. I installed Windows Server 2008 onto this, to test the new Windows Server Virtualisation (Hyper-V) functionality. Unfortunately the D830 isn't a Tablet PC, and there's no functionality in a standard Windows Server 2008 install to support Tablet PC functionality anyway.

So I gambled slightly in purchasing a Wacom Bamboo tablet. However the software appears to install fine under Windows Server 2008 x64 RC0, and provides standard tablet functionality. So I can continue to doodle diagrams in OneNote:

Wacom Bamboo tablet

The tablet is quite small (about 19cm on each edge), thin (<1cm) and weighs about 300 grams. It has four buttons at the top (illuminated in blue) which can be programmed, as well as a little touchpad which allows scrolling up/down in windows using a motion similar to the click wheel in an iPod.

Overall, I'm quite impressed. The finish is very nice and it looks are quite attractive. The tablet area has a nice feel, that feels almost like a mat, rather than a piece of plastic. Out of the box, the tablet area maps to the entire screen of your machine (i.e. the bottom left of the tablet is the bottom left of your screen, and visa versa for the top right). For a very high resolution display, this means that the tablet is very, very sensitive! However this can be configued in the tablet software. You can either change the screen area that the tablet maps to, or change the movement of the tablet pen to emulating a mouse. Lastly, the packaging was gorgeous - similar to what you expect from Apple.

For a purchase that was just over $100, I'm quite impressed. My only negative so far is that my Cross Tablet PC pen doesn't work with it, and that it doesn't come with some kind of carry bag/pouch/sleeve. Those are minor quibbles though.

Bamboo 2