in the beginning....

I bought a Fujitsu Siemens Stylistic ST4110P tablet PC from ebay, for about £150. It came with nice dock - with a DVD in it too, I was expecting a CD, power supply, and pre-installed with Windows 2000.

My use case was for basically browsing off my sofa. I've got the house all wifi'd up, but I was finding it annoying to either:
a) browse on my mac from the study (too 'lonely', can't chat with wife, etc),
b) browse via wii on the TV (wife watching said TV),
c) use work laptop (keyboard gets in the way, too big),
d) use my Nintendo DS (browser not quite there yet),
e) use my Windows Mobile and/or Palm Centro phone (screen too small).

Sooo, a tablet PC seemed like a good idea.

It worked out ok, wifi was ok (the inbuilt one isn't the best, used a DWL122 dongle), it wasn't snappy, but 'ok'. I installed VLC on it, to watch videos; a 10" screen is quite nice for that. Oh dear... stuttery, jumpy, nasty - Win2k or the hard disk couldn't keep up with it.

Time for linux... Xubuntu seemed a sensible choice, although I did consider OpenSUSE. Or maybe Puppy or DSL if I was desperate.