So, I engaged in conspicuous consumption and got a sweet X61 tablet. I’ve been meaning to put together a list of thoughts.

Thoughts:

• Mouse gestures are super helpful.
• The “adjust screen orientation based on physical tilt of laptop”/AutoRotate is too finicky.
• You NEED to install the wacom drivers if you want stuff to work in Photoshop. Boo.

Stuff I Installed:

• Windows Vista - XP has pretty lackluster tablet support. And Ubuntu, well… at least my wireless works there.
• Geckotip - basically gets the Windows tablet input panel-thingee to recognize Firefox (so password fields are recognized as password fields, and the URL bar gets some nifty URL buttons like .com and so on)
• Wacom Driver - Like I said above, required to get pressure sensitivity in Photoshop. I wish someone had told me about that much earlier
• Microsoft Experience Pack for TabletPC - some cool utilities that ended up being nifty. There appear to be two: Experience Pack for Vista and Experience Pack for XP.
  • Ink Desktop for Vista - The XP one has something cool, an Ink Desktop, that does not appear in the Experience Pack but is available separately. (This seems ridiculously finicky. I put up with it, but it likes to leave weird artifacts on your desktop)
    PS: seems you could use Ave’s Desktop Effects to do something similar. Haven’t tried it due to the time-limitedness, but hopefully it sucks less than the Microsoft one.
  • There’s also the Microsoft Origami Experience Pack with Sudoku. You know, in case the new games in Vista weren’t enough!
  • Tablet PC PowerToys - There’s a whole mess of interesting apps.
• Wallpaper Gyro - There are two ways to deal with the fact that wallpapers don’t rotate with you when you change screen orientation: find a new wallpaper, or find new software. Wallpaper Gyro rotates or swaps wallpapers when you rotate your screen.