5. As A Tablet PC

The Toshiba Portege M400 demonstrates the limits of Tablet PC very well. To put it bluntly, for my tastes, the M400 is both too large and too heavy to work effectively as a Tablet PC. Additionally, Tablet PC turns a decent set of hardware components into silicon snails.

The Portege M400 is about the size of a piece of 8.5 x 11 inch paper. You'd think that would be just fine for a Tablet PC computer. But when you combine that 8.5 x 11 inches with the M400's 1.5 inch thickness, you're no longer talking about a piece of paper. Add to that the notebook's nearly five pound weight with its battery and you're beginning to talk torture, like when someone is required to hold a heavy stone in one hand with arms bent at the elbows for hours.

I honestly couldn't hold the unsupported notebook in Tablet PC mode at working level for more than a minute or two. After that my wrists cried for relief and a range of muscles begged to be left alone. But, you might argue, the M400 is really designed to sit on a table, not unsupported in your hands. Have you ever tried writing on the top page of a notepad that is 1.5 inches above the surface that supports it? The only way I was able to do it for an extended period was by using, a few clashing symbols please, a wrist rest.

I was in a meeting the other day. I brought the M400 along. I tried holding the device in the torture position. That didn't work. So I put it in my lap. No cigar; I still couldn't rest my wrists and arms comfortably. Then I put it on the table and hankered for a wrist rest. Within five minutes I was writing on a yellow legal pad, which rested about three-eights of an inch above the meeting table. As they say in the "Three Bears" kids story, that was just right.

There was one place where I was able to use the M400 effectively as a Tablet PC. That was lying in bed with my knees up and supporting the device as it sat on my stomach. In this position, I was able to surf the Internet for an extended period while experiencing no serious pain or difficulty. When I say no serious pain, I include burns from a too hot case bottom. On battery the M400's bottom temperature never exceeded 94 degrees, warm but not hot, while running MobileMark 2005 tests and playing DVDs. Temperatures never reached more than 88 degrees on the bottom when I was surfing the Internet.

Finally, given the higher speed hardware components in the Portege M400, it was disturbing to see it run as slowly as it did. This is much more the fault of the Tablet PC operating system than the configuration of the computer. Tablet PC is always looking for input from various devices including the real and graphical keyboards, the stylus and the microphone. That alone is enough to bring most mighty computers to their knees. Add to that all of the other software Toshiba loads in memory and the measly 512 MB of memory in the M400 I tested and you start thinking "cup of coffee time" when the computer boots up. If you've already got an application or two open, it's also coffee time when you open an application such as Word or PowerPoint.

Sure you can remove the memory resident extras Toshiba provides, but you'll still wait a minute or two after a cold start before the M400 is fully booted and ready for input. Yes, you can use standby mode, but that eats battery power rather quickly and sometimes, like every other portable computer running Windows XP, the M400 boots up with its network connections in an unstable state. I suppose hibernation might be a solution at least to the battery power issues, but I have even more trouble with network connections and hibernation.