Tecra M4

One of my New Year’s Resolutions that I didn’t blog was to get my personal technology act together.  Now that I’ve made my phone decision, I need to address my laptop.

I use one computer for everything, business, personal, entertainment, and I take it with me wherever I go.  I take it to the office and home.  To the west coast and Thailand.  I keep most everything I need on it and I use it constantly.  I know there are better ways to work, using multiple machines with shared folders and synching, but this is how I work and I am not in the mood to change it right now.

So I need a small, light, durable laptop with a big hard drive and an internal CD/DVD.  For the past 10 years that has meant Thinkpads for me.  I have had probably six or seven of them in that time and I am currently using a ThinkPad T42.

I am getting a new laptop for a couple reasons.  First, my workstyle doesn’t cut it on 60 gigs anymore.  I need more hard drive space, at least 80 gigs.  Second, and more importantly, I have become envious of the tablet format that Charlie has been using for the past year.

I used to take my laptop into meetings so I could do a quick web search, look at competition, do an alexa search, etc during a meeting. The immediate data that provides can often make a meeting a lot more productive. But I have found that the laptop format puts up a wall between me and the entrepreneur and I don’t like that. So I have stopped bringing a laptop into meetings for the most part for several years.

Charlie takes his laptop in tablet form into meetings and uses it to take notes and it is so much less obtrusive.  I like that and want to give it a try myself.

So I’ve done the research and concluded that my best option is the Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet/laptop.  I have found a bunch of reviews on the web, this one being the most comprehensive, and plan to go through them in detail.

But I figured that some of you might have personal experience with this machine and could give me some feedback. I am particularly concerned about the following problems/issues that I have come across in my research; weight, heat, hybernation issues, and power management conflicts.

Please leave me comments or send me emails if you can tell me anything, good or bad, about this computer.