Tecra M4 Tablet

Just received my Tecra M4 Tablet today!

Specs:

Dothan 1.6GHZ
2GB PC4200 DDR2 Ram
14" LCD @ 1440x1050
Geforce 6600 TE /w 128M
60GB 5200RPM Sata HD
8X Dual Layer DVD Writer

The machine is light (compared to what I had before; a Dell 9100) and the screen is awesome.

Tablet use is to get used to, but so far I like the ability to sketch on the tablet itself instead of having to use my seperate intuos tablet to get pen input.

The machine is damn fast! I stayed away from tablets before because they were outdated and slow. This is anything but slow and easily speeds past the Dell 9100 I had, despite what the CPU GHZ suggests.

3DMark2003 score was 3808 out of the box. The GF6600 is downclocked, but again the performance is higher than most other notebooks this size, and no tablet can match it.

The noise of the fan can get quite loud when the machine is being pushed. It gets quiet very fast though, and the power setting options are very robust and it is possible to get settings where the fan is quiet/near silent for general use where the fan noise would be detrimental.

No dead pixels!

The area to the left of the touchpad can get very warm when the notebook is pushed.

Overall this is a beast of a machine that nothing else can touch: good graphics, good size and relatively light, and great performance with a convertible tablet form factor.

When I have a chance I can do that. I'm not sure where I can host pictures to do it though, so maybe some suggestions would be good.

I know www.tabletpcbuzz.com has some nice pictures in their Toshiba forum, though, if you want to glance there.

The M4 is a real dust collector. Probably because it is primarily black when my prior notebooks were silver color. It seems though that I just have to look away after dusting off the keyboard for all the dust to return.

Toshiba really, really installs a LOT of junk on the machine. No restore disc, either so I have to look in the manual to see if it is even an option to reset the machine minus all the junk. Uninstalling seems to be ok, but still...

The Toshiba utilities themself are real nice, but they install realplayer, AOL, a few other media apps, junk apps, etc. It is real annoying how full the desktop was when starting up. If I can find an easy way to reinstall Tablet 2005 with just the drivers and Toshiba apps that I want I will do it.

So far the machine is awesome, minus the dust. :P Keyboard is great, monitor is great (although viewing angles aren't the greatest), color and constrast seem very good. Speed is great. Most of the problems are nitpicks and software related (as in too much preinstalled).

I haven't really had much problem with the pen shipped with it yet. It isn't as nice as my wacom pen, which doesn't work with tablet pcs, but it isn't bad. It is a very plain black pen with a clip on it, your standard tip, and an eraser. I know there are better 3rd party pens, but see no need to buy a replacement/extra just yet.

If they will take it back I would say do so as well. It doesn't take too long for them to ship out right now.

Oh, I have since upgraded the video drivers to 76.45 from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/. Since this is a tablet PC you have to make further modifications to the INI file they provide... RotateFlag has to be set from 4 to 0x40 in order for the automatic rotation to work. The upgraded drivers are much better over those provided by Toshiba.

You have to update the Wacom drivers to, and install the patch for the R15 Toshiba notebook to get pressure sensitivity in apps like Painter and Photoshop. Out of the box pressure sensitivity just seems to work in Alias Sketchbook. With the drivers/patches mentioned above everything runs great.

There really isn't that many bugs with the notebook.

Over the weekend I went over to a friends house and we played Guild Wars... probably a total of about 8 hours. I ran it at 1440x1050 everything maxed, no AA and ran into no problems. Kept it on a desk as it did get hot, but other than that things were fine. The underclock DID occur but since I was not using AA I didn't really even notice it other than the message popping up once.

There was no constant slowdown or freeze up. The throttling software/hardware did fine making sure the machine didn't heat up too badly. You won't ever be overclocking this machine, but as far as performance goes it is really good considering the size and tablet platform. End performance is about equal to an x600 after the underclocking occurs.

I play BattleField 2 with a mix of mostly high, some medium options at 1024x768 fine. I can play HL2 with mostly high at 1024x768 fine, and doom3 at 1024x768 or high (single player) at 800x600.

It plays games fine, just don't expect it to compare to machines that have X700+ or 6800+ video cards. The video on the tablet M4 is just a bit better than an X600 or an ATI 9700 mobile.