I needed a computer for college.
With pen and paper, especially once you’ve run out of space, it’s easy to get disorganised. The main advantage of digital note taking is the ability to reorganise your notes easily. I thought taking notes with my iBook would save me a lot of time. However, I soon discovered that the mouse isn’t an ideal tool for drawing diagrams, and that writing equations using the character map is a slow process. I did try to remedy this by drawing diagrams on paper and referring to them in my Word documents and using short hand notation for equations. In the end, I spent more time reorganising notes.
The Tablet PC seemed to be a solution. Only one nit-picky problem: I wanted a high resolution screen. 1024 X 768 just wasn’t enough when I was working in Flash and Dreamweaver. 1280 X 1024 was the minimum resolution I was looking for in a laptop. For a long time I debated whether or not to purchase the Toshiba Portege M200/M205 – the only tablet on the market at the time with the resolution I was looking for. The lack of a built in optical drive kept me debating whether or not I should purchase this laptop. And then Toshiba released what seemed to be the perfect laptop: the Tecra M4.
What kept me from making my decision to purchase this laptop was the lack of online reviews. After reading Eric Mack’s blog < www.ericmackonline.com> about his experiences with the M4, I took the plunge and ordered a customised Tecra M4 from toshibadirect.com. I’ve decided to make a blog of my own to review the laptop and to provide updates (like Eric) about my tablet experience.
