Man, this is hard. My Lenovo X41 is a dog compared with my work T42 machine. One of the reasons I bought the X41 was because I was so impressed with the performance of the T42.
I have read a number of posts indicating that the fault lay, not in the hardware, but rather in the software that IBM/Lenovo encumbered the unit with.
But guess what? You cannot get install discs from IBM/Lenovo for just the OS, you have to use their recovery discs which brings the PC to the same, sorry state it started in.
You also cannot purchase XP Tablet PC edition in retail outlets, although the Lenovo rep I spoke with suggested I may be able to purchase such from Microsoft for $300 or so.
I’ve already paid for a licensed copy of Windows XP Tablet PC edition, I just want to have it and only it on my tablet. I don’t want trial software and I certainly don’t want all the junk running on the unit that came with it and slows it down so severely.
I have already gone the route of disabling and removing everything from the unit that I can think of that won’t cripple it. This provided a great deal of relief but the unit is still slower than molasses, suffering from the stuttering cursor issue and very slow reboot times.
I picked up an install CD from a friend with an MSDN subscription, but of course it’s configured not to accept my OEM serial number. So I also ended up using his corporate number. But since it’s just for XP rather than for the Tablet PC edition, that’s all I’m able to install. 🙁
So I’ve just finished installing XP for the second time on my laptop (thinking that perhaps I made an error the first time) and have just vanilla Windows XP professional on there.
The bright side is, the X41 now boots up as fast as does my T42. So that proves to me that the hardware is not at fault. I’m looking in to other alternatives but I have a feeling I’m going to have to go with the miserable recovery process and then spend a couple of hours stripping out all the junk that I neither want nor need.
To Microsoft I say, “Grow up, this shouldn’t be this hard.”. To anybody considering the purchase of a Tablet PC, I say “Take heed – check out the various posts on the tablet PC communities. The X41 is technically very good but has been saddled with software that makes it perform as if it were a generation older than it really is.”.
More to come…