Hi, I'm thinking about buying the tc1000 (My f

[Stuba]

Hi,
I'm thinking about buying the tc1000 (My first tablet). I've never used wireless internet, is it going to feel slow on this system? How about watching a movie on it? I've also seen it offered with a celeron 800, any advantage since it's intel? Any other thoughts on the machien?

Thanks

[DaveTN]

Hi Stuba and welcome to the Buzz. I own a TC1000 and my Previous laptop was a gateway Solo with a 600mhz processor and 512 mb RAM. Compared o the Solo, my TC1000 is quite fast. I run every day apps on mine including all of Office 2003, I also do a lot on the internet and I have no problems. Wireless is good, however, I replaced my Compaq mini wifi (802.11b) card with a Dell Truemobile 802.11g and the range and throughput improved significantly.
As far as investments go, if your TC1000 has only 256 or 512 MB RAM, you will want to up it to the max of 748MB...I did notice an improvement by doing that.
Movies, well, they are OK, with a bigscreen at home and a 21" LCD on my desktop, My TC1000 is last in line for a portable movie theater. I have tried it a couple times with an external DVD drive and it was fairly good.
You already hit the number one source for Tablet infor by coming here. I would also like to suggest a site by Dr. Christopher James: www.tc-one-thousand.com
He has a great deal of infor on the TC1000 and TC1100.
Good luck with your purchase!

Best regards,

David

[Chrissss]

I bought a TC1000 a couple months ago and I'm quite pleased with it.

I've kept the Wifi B card in mine and it's plenty fast enough for internet/email use.

I've watched several movies on mine, but I re-encode them into DivX format, so the TC1000 has no problem playing them.

Chris...

[Chancellor Martok]

If it's offered with a Celeron 800 Mhz processor, then it's a TC1100 and not a TC1000.

[Stuba]

Thanks for the opinions evryone. what do you think, I should go with the tc1000, or the 1100 with a Celeron 800 for $200 more?

[Robert Carnegie]

quote:Originally posted by Stuba

Thanks for the opinions evryone. what do you think, I should go with the tc1000, or the 1100 with a Celeron 800 for $200 more?

Well, I'm surprised that Chrissss is happy playing movies on TC1000. I haven't tried it myself, but multimedia capability is supposed to be a weak point of the Crusoe processor - relevant processor functions are either missing or slow. I think the Celeron will be better, although I'm not sure how much - the early desktop Celerons didn't have multimedia extensions either, I think. But Celeron is just a brand name now, like Centrino. Celeron used to mean Intel-on-a-budget, hence missing multimedia functions. For those you paid full price. But that doesn't necessarily describe the feature set of current processors.

Perhaps you should test this out if it's important - incidentally, how do you intend to get movies into the machine? DVD player on USB? I guess, too, for this use, you should look closely at the screen quality.

On the other hand, you could approach this purchase on the basis that if you like a Tablet, you'll upgrade quickly. There are machines on the market now that blow both of the Compaq Tablets away. But they cost.

Incidentally, Windows XP Pro and Tablet Edition include a one-user Terminal Services server (switched off, I hope), so while I haven't tried this on my personal machines, either, you could even use a lower-specification Tablet PC as a networked remote desktop with handwriting et cetera to any other XP Pro machine, plain laptop or desktop, or to a Windows server. I doubt this is a great way to watch movies, but I'm sure it has uses.

[Robert Carnegie]

quote:Originally posted by Robert Carnegie
Well, I'm surprised that Chrissss is happy playing movies on TC1000. I haven't tried it myself, but multimedia capability is supposed to be a weak point of the Crusoe processor - relevant processor functions are either missing or slow.

By the way, my TC1000 also sucks at speech recognition. That is, recognition works, and is quite accurate after extensive training with a good microphone, but it takes a heck of a long time to arrive. Handwriting recognition is also not particularly snappy.

Heck, even shutting the darned PC down takes an age. So does popping Tablet Input Panel up and down - maybe because I mostly don't use TIP, so it doesn't stay in memory, gets flushed to disk, so when I do use it then it has to reload. So your experience might be different. Or it may be okay if you leave it running.

[William]

Crusoes (and efficeons) are actually rather good at multimedia work.

[Chrissss]

quote:Originally posted by Robert Carnegie

quote:Originally posted by Stuba

Thanks for the opinions evryone. what do you think, I should go with the tc1000, or the 1100 with a Celeron 800 for $200 more?

Well, I'm surprised that Chrissss is happy playing movies on TC1000. I haven't tried it myself, but multimedia capability is supposed to be a weak point of the Crusoe processor - relevant processor functions are either missing or slow. I think the Celeron will be better, although I'm not sure how much - the early desktop Celerons didn't have multimedia extensions either, I think. But Celeron is just a brand name now, like Centrino. Celeron used to mean Intel-on-a-budget, hence missing multimedia functions. For those you paid full price. But that doesn't necessarily describe the feature set of current processors.

Perhaps you should test this out if it's important - incidentally, how do you intend to get movies into the machine? DVD player on USB? I guess, too, for this use, you should look closely at the screen quality.

On the other hand, you could approach this purchase on the basis that if you like a Tablet, you'll upgrade quickly. There are machines on the market now that blow both of the Compaq Tablets away. But they cost.

(snip)

Actually, the movies play very well, but you must go through a re-encoding process.

I'm coming to TPC's from the PPC market. I've got an app that allows 1-step conversion of DVD to .avi. Movies I convert are 25 fps and about 400 Kbps. The TC1000 can easily handle that.

People coming to TPC from the notebook market will of course try to compare performance against top-of-the-line notebooks. And they're disappointed when the performance isn't as good. Come. on... TPC's aren't there yet... soon, but not yet. I had no such misconceptions. And coming from PPC's I'm used to doing extra work to allow the device to handle tasks designed for more powerful machines, like multi-media for example.

When I bought my TC1000 I did not expect it to run like my Dell Dimension 8400 desktop, nor would I expect it to run like a well equipped laptop...that's not what I bought it for. I bought it for ultra-light portable computing. My expectations for this device have been met. Would I like on of the more powerful TPC's out there...definitely! But this serves me well.

Even when I'm evangalizing TPC's (and I've gotton a couple folk to buy them because of this) I always tell them they're not going to get the same performance as an equally priced notebook. That's not the point of a TPC in my mind. You're going to take a performance hit for the portability, simple as that.

Chris...