I have an older Tablet PC (NEC Versa Litepad) that has a super form factor but was hobbled by the technology of the time. A slow CPU, not much RAM, and a terrible early 1.8 inch hard drive. I always liked the idea of it more than using it. I read a lot of Zinio magazines and took notes for a while, but battery life and machine performance were bad. So it turned into a rarely used utility machine at my house.That has changed now. I recently was exploring flash SSD drives and thought to try one out, but they are not large enough yet for a real work machine. However, I thought I might try it in the tiny form factor for my Tablet.
WHAT A HUGE DIFFERENCE!!!
I backed up the old drive and restored onto the new 32 GB Samsung flash drive and rebooted. Amazingly, it worked fine and far better than the old drive. I would say it has completely transformed the machine into a useful home tablet. It is now silent, it sleeps and wakes almost instantly. The drive no longer grinds away swapping all of the time (not much RAM on that machine, just 512 MB (too small for modern XP on a slow CPU)).I think the real problem with that machine was clearly the drive and the awful seek times those 1.8 inch drives have. It’s fine for streaming work like an iPod, but an OS (especially XP) is always hunting around on the disk for whatever garbage Windows seems to be doing. The drive access light is right on top of the tablet and it now blinks a lot, but it used to be solidly on with the old HD. And you could hear to the old drive chugging away the whole time! Battery life is much longer because I can tune the sleep cycles much more aggressively than before. Even full hibernate and recover can happen in the same amount of time it used to take to wake from sleep.
The machine is now sitting near where I sit in the house. I can grab it for simple news reading as I sit and watch TV, I can change my music (Slimp3 players), and I can do more casual web surfing from around the house. No more huddling in front of the laptop for simple web surfing. Funny how everything old is new again! A simple phase change is all that was needed to make a dud technology really work for a geeky consumer. I think tablets are the right machine for having around the house, but not great for real work.
Now I have my electronic newspaper on the table.
