Scott Hanselman reports on his new Toshiba M205 Tablet PC. Dam I wish I had one. Unfortunately it will be a while. Microsoft typically swaps out our hardware every 2-3 years. At 3 years the warranties are usually done and they’ve already finished depreciating them. I’ve averaged a new laptop about every 2 years and a new desktop at about the same rate. However, this year I got a lot of new hardware due to my switch over to working on Virtual PC. My current crop of hardware consists of:
- Apple PowerMac G5 1.8 GHz with 512 MB RAM and 120 GB SATA hard drive
- Apple PowerBook G4 1.0 GHz with MB RAM and 60 GB HD
- Dell 3.0 GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM 160 GB SATA hard drive
- Toshiba Protégé 3500 tablet pc with 1.3 GHz PIII with 512 MB RAM. Feels like 200 MHz though
- Gateway 1 GHz PIII running Windows Server 2003
Item 1, 2 and 3 were purchased this fiscal year. Item 4 was purchased November 2002. So perhaps in fiscal 05 I’ll get a new laptop, but this new tablet sounds sweet. I Item 5 was my old PC of 3 or so years before I got my new Dell.
It’s not normal for a Microsoft Program Manager to have this much hardware, but in MacBU we average double the machines due to the fact that we have both Macs and PCs. Most MacBU PMs have at least a Mac and PC desktop as well as a Mac and PC laptop. Many of us have two Mac desktops so that we can dogfood more flavors of our software as well as new versions of the Mac OS.