as excited as i was about adding the hp tx2000z to my collection of hardware, after the whole experiences i’m feeling the exact opposite. the digitizer/touchscreen worked very well, but as far as the tablet itself i’m not even considering hanging on to it. if hp had actually qa’d the system before they shipped it to me i most likely wouldn’t have had the horrible unboxing/setup experience that i did. it’s a shame too, cause now i won’t even bother looking @ their $500 linux umpc that’s coming out.

03/24: ordered | 04/02: shipped | 04/03: delivered

10 days build, 2 days to ship, .25 days before i consider returning it. the unboxing was uneventful, setting up vista on the first boot took over 2 hours, and creating my recovery cds took almost twice that. i don’t think 3+ hours of setup time just to have an updated machine is really that acceptable. from what i’ve read most of the initial setup was the hp customizations vs anything to really do with vista.

i spent a little time cleaning up the customizations and loaded the latest vista/hp updates and noticed that the screen’s colors just seemed off. vista said i was running @ 32-bit, but some parts of the screen were definitely lower than that. i thought maybe the nvidia go 6150 was having some issues keeping up with the desktop effects so i switched to a windows classic theme, but that didn’t help. i topped out the shared memory for the go 6150 in the bios and also set the laptop to run at the highest performance…. still having wierd color issues.

i also noticed that whenever you adjusted the display or put any pressure pretty much anywhere on the keyboard/hinge that the video just went nuts. it really liked to do it while i was typing if the display wasn’t angled just properly…

after dealing with hp support i decided to just return the laptop. and yes, their voip does suck. i lost about every 4th word in the conversation. it’s annoying to have to ask someone to repeat what they just said every few seconds. i’m still very interested in a linux tabletpc, but next time i’m not going to let a $500 discount sway my decision.

disclaimer: i’m still grumpy @ hp. yes i was trying to get technical support on a weekend, but that really shouldn’t matter since they outsource all their support. once i did get a hold of their customer service (only mon-fri) they offered to send me a replacement but at that point i just wanted to get rid of the tx200z, period.