Cool Tech Reviews

Yes, you can still buy a new PC with Windows XP installed on it. Windows XP ceased to be available at retail on June 30, 2008 but there are a number of exceptions. The relevant exception for a consumer or a small business owner is that "OEMs can downgrade Vista Business or Vista Ultimate licenses to Windows XP Professional or Tablet PC versions for customers indefinitely," where OEMs are the large PC manufacturers.

However, there’s a difference between "can" and "will" or "will with no hassle" so Christopher Null at PC World tried to purchase a PC with XP from Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, Acer, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and Asus and reports on the very mixed results. Hit the article for the full details on each, but the best bets for an machine with XP preinstalled are:

Consumer PC: Toshiba, Fujitsu, Lenovo

Business PC: HP, Fujitsu, Lenovo

If you are willing to pay extra or install XP from a CD, the choices are even more numerous. Also Asus has its line of Eee ultra low-cost PCs (ULPC) which come with XP under a different exemption in the rules.

Solid state, non volatile disk storage replacement has been a dream for a lot of years and while flash disks are finally killing the floppy, advances in hard disk technology have always kept the price per byte low enough that solid state didn’t have much leverage except for special use devices. That may be starting to change as laptop manufacturers have started introducing new models with flash disks instead of hard drives in some notebook models. Martyn Williams at PCWorld:

Sony will replace hard disks with flash memory when it launches a new model of its Vaio U laptop next week, it said today (June 27 - ed.).
…
Flash has long been eyed as a potential replacement for hard drives because it is lighter, runs silently, offers faster data access, and uses less power, but price has always been an obstacle.
…
The Vaio UX90 will come with 16GB of flash memory storage in place of the 30GB hard drive on the original model. It will cost around $1805, or about $345 more expensive than the disk-based model, and go on sale in Japan on July 3.

The UX Micro PCs look like a PDA on steroids, but they run Widows XP Professional and regular Windows applications as well as having some media player functionality.

Samsung Electronics launched a couple of PCs with flash storage earlier this month. The Q30 laptop and Q1 ultra mobile PC both use Samsung’s “solid state disk,” which packs 32GB of NAND flash memory into a case the same size as a 1.8-inch hard drive.

The Q1 is Samsung’s entry in the oddball Origami (AKA UMPC) tablet PC form factor developed by Microsoft and Intel, while the Q30-SSD (Solid State Drive) is a regular laptop:

Sammy just announced that their sweet, sweet NAND-based Q30-SSD we first got down and dirty with at CeBIT will hit the shelves in Korea (only) from early June onward. Yeah, it’ll fetch a steep $3,700 US-equiv (a roughly $900 premium) on that aging 1.2GHz Celeron M Q30 platform, but that 32GB of NAND reads 300 percent faster (53MB/s) and write 150 percent quicker (28MB/s) than normal hard drives while offering better protection against shock, 25-50% faster boots and sleep recovery times, longer battery life and reduced weight all in a completely silent, fanless package. Hoozah!

To which, I guess I have to add, ouch! The prices still have a way to go to attract the average consumer. More on Samsung’s solid state hard drive here.

Over at his PC Magazine blog, Michael J. Miller has a preliminary review of the Toshiba Portege M400 convertible tablet PC. Frankly, it doesn’t seem all that different from other convertible tablets except for the compact 12 inch screen size which is the main point:

I’m a big fan of both small notebooks and tablet computers. I like my laptops light, because I’m a train commuter, and carry my laptop a lot. And I like tablet computers mostly because I like reading on them (with the screen in a vertical position), and for occasionally annotating notes and documents with the pen.

Ultimately, Miller remarks that he prefers the Lenovo Thinkpad X41 12 inch convertible tablet which is even lighter at 3.7 pounds than the M400 at 4.5 pounds. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Eric Mack who teases his readers with news of an “ultra-wide screen” tablet PC that he is expecting shortly from an unnamed manufacturer:

I just got off the phone with an excited representative from a well known computer manufacturer who called to let me know that, because of my blog, I’ve been selected to evaluate one of their new ultra-wide screen Tablet PCs. She promised me that it was perfect for Tablet PC mind-mapping and that I would be very happy with the display resolution and size.

Since Mack also says he’d “be happy with a 2.5″ thick Tablet the size of a Tecra M4 with a fold-out screen twice the size of an M4″ which is 14.1 inches, it’s clear he’s not worried about portability.

I can see the merits of both points of view, but the real problem is that the amount of time I really want a tablet PC of either size is vanishingly small. Battery life inhibits true portability and I am not comfortable enough with tablet technology to have some monster version parked permanently on my desk taking up space. I’m hopeful though, that one of these days there will be a tablet that convinces me.