Knowing when to say "when" - Goodbye, X60 Tablet PC...

Goodbye, Lenovo Thinkpad X60.  In addition to the problems I had in the past, I experienced a new one last week.  The lenovo tablet has a sensor in it which determines the orientation of the screen.  When a user flips it around, the screen re-orients itself from landscape to portrait mode.

Last week, the sensor started firing for no reason.  My screen would flip while I was typing with the tablet on a stable desk.  Sigh.  Enough is enough.  Time to call this machine a "Lemon" and move on (are there lemon laws for computers?).

So I had to get a new tablet.  My manager and I decided on a Gateway, and it came in today.  I don't have any particular concerns about any one brand over another, so Gateway is fine with me.  Also, this increases the "hardware diversity" of our team.  We try to get as many different pieces of hardware as possible for all of the testers, developers and program managers to use as possible.  While there are real world advantages to standardizing on one piece of hardware for everyone  (makes tech support calls a bit easier), we have to cover as many bases as possible with our hardware to test.

The OneNote test team here in Redmond has 13 total people on it.  We also have testers overseas but I'm not sure exactly how many there are.  So that gives us 13 total tablets for everyone to use on a daily basis.  A little quick searching newegg.com or amazon.com will show that there are far more than 13 tablet models for sale.  To help increase our hardware coverage further, Office has a configuration lab for everyone to use which has a huge amount of other hardware.

Now I'll have some comparison between 2 tablets.  During the time the Lenovo worked, it worked well and I strangely have a positive impression of the machine.  I really feel I just had the bad luck of getting one single poorly created machine.  I hope the Gateway is better.  Only time will tell.

Comments, questions, concerns or criticisms?

John