Electronic arts tablet on a budget
I have struggled using a mouse or a trackpoint or a ball for editing photos and drawing logos. I’ve always lusted for something like the WACOM Cintiq. But at $1999, it was not in my “justification budget”. My rescue came from the nearly depthless eBay. A little searching and I found a number of tablet PCs what would do the job nicely. I wanted a good resolution screen so I settled on searches for the Tosheba M200. There are a lot of them that have come back from corporate lease programs and they are far from warn out. So why not give them a - pun alert - new lease on life.
I needed to be careful as the M200 came in few different configurations - CPU speed varied a bit, installed memory, but most important was the two different screen resolutions - 1024×768 and 1400×1050. I have a 1024×768 screen today with my Thinkpad X60 and it is tough to live with. Fortunately some auctions post the specs clearly and others answered my questions. For less that $400 (including shipping) I got a good condition tablet PC, docking station, and external CD/DVD drive. That’s a whole lot less that Cintiq and the tablet has its own CPU. I did scrounge an extra 512MB SIMM that was collecting dust from a laptop that was upgraded to 1GB SIMMs some time back. The result runs GIMP very nicely and I can work in landscape or portrait mode depending on what image I am working on.
