A few staff members requested the capability of a touch screen on their laptops so after some shopping around I managed to find a really good deal on the HP TX2-1160ea. The tablet PC is fairly good spec with a dual core AMD processor running at 2.2GHz, 3 gig of ram, 320 GB hard drive and an ATI Radeon 3200 but its biggest feature is multi-touch. Not many laptops out there are capable of multi-touch but I thought it would be important when upgrading to Windows 7 to have this feature. As for my job setting them up was fairly straight forward, as like any other HP product it does come with a fair amount of preview-ware such as Office 2007 trail and Norton. About 10 or so programs needed to be uninstall and a few disabled from boot to make the machine slightly more nippy, with the running Windows Vista I was concerned of slow-down but they do seem to be very responsive still compared to other demo units I have seen. Continue reading for more pictures and a special Windows 7 surprise:

 

 

After logging the serial keys of the tablets and smart watering them I managed to get a little time to play with the touch screen and even install Windows 7 onto one of the laptops to see how it performed. I was running Windows 7 RC1 64bit on one vs Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit on the other and the differences are fairly immense. First off I think the beta drivers have improved the multi touch recognition significantly with Windows 7 detecting 95% of my gestures with Vista detecting about 80% (these were rough flicks etc). Secondly the software behind Windows 7 really starts to shine through when web browsing with there being plenty of satisfying animations acknowledging your gestures. Whereas Vista the multi-touch features feel like a separate input device rather than integrating which is understandable. The HP software didn't work with Windows 7 so that is something to try in the future but by the looks of things these laptops could be upgrading to Windows 7 as soon as it arrives in October.