This kind of surprised me, but I’m now a Tablet owner. Yay! We went to the Future Shop (kind of like a Canadian Best Buy, even though I see, after searching for this post, that Best Buy is now in Canada) Friends and Family night: a night of CRAZY savings for special customers. The criteria for being a special customer is having a heartbeat. 

I was looking around at the computer stuff, not to buy necessarily, when I laid my eyes on a sweet Tablet deal: a tablet for under CAD$2000 (~ $200 US (even though the US dollar is so bad)) plus the 7% discount, plus don’t pay for 12 months. The only bad part is that it’s from a company I have never heard of: Averatec. It was an impulse buy, but since I was planning on getting one within the year, I figured why not; the specs were nothing to sneeze at, and it’s a tablet. I’ve been wanting one ever since they’ve been announced. It also has the distinction of being my first notebook computer.

I brought it home, opened it up, turned it on. I’ve custom built all my machines for the past five years, so I forgot how much a pain in the ass pre-built machines can be. There is a ton of crap software on it by default; it only had Tablet PC edition 2003; and OneNote wouldn’t upgrade to SP1. The CDs they came with are all encrypted Ghost files. So I can’t even re-pave it. I called tech support to solve the OneNote issue: they told me to download the trial version from Microsoft, and then put in my product key. Riiiiight. Why don’t you just include the CD with the product then? Can I do that with the OS? No? Idiots. Anyway, despite my gripes, I like the machine and don’t regret the purchase. Next time I get one, I’ll do what I was planning to do with this one: go with a reputable company. 

Now I just have to think of something to do with it. I have VS on it, and a few ideas…

Any recommendations? (Developer tools or cool apps)

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