It didn't get any better as the little machine was completely bogged down with HP's bloatware, not to mention Vista Home. To make matters completely absurd we had to wait nearly 3 hours for the little [expletive deleted] to make its own recovery DVDs.
Let's start at the beginning for this little HP Pavilion TX2530EA laptop, which for us involved a BSOD on booting. Since it was attributed to an internal power issue we correctly assumed that for its first boot it would need to be plugged in for an initial charge.
Obviously the crown prince of first impressions was not looking to good at this point, but since it was probably the first Puma based notebook in the country we decided to do what any rational person faced with bloatware on a bed of low grade OS minus DHCP sprinkles would do, and format. We upgraded the little guy to Vista Ultimate, installed all the drivers from HP's site, 8 million Windows updates and harked at how slow it was.
Then something quite incredible happened. When updating HPs GPU drivers with the Catalysts from the AMD site, we noticed that the entire platform was being updated, busses and all. The machine suddenly began tearing through Vista and we even managed COD4 albeit at 1280xUGLY.
Now we are talking. Happy with the performance we achieved after two days of work, we suddenly cared that the tx was a tablet. Operating by touch is based on two modes, the first of which is passive and senses fingers or other body parts and will allow for a right click if held down. The second mode is active and involves the included pen.
The pen tip clicks, the side button right clicks and the back erases. There are a host of multimedia buttons around the screen when you are hiding your keyboard, which will allow you to rotate the image or play a movie and just in case these aren't enough there is also a remote control.
The only price you pay for the awesome tablet features, is a slight compromise on screen quality. There is a perceptible grain that limits viewing angles slightly and makes the screen look as if some crafty devil applied Glad Wrap while you were sleeping. This gets worse when you introduce relatives to finger based solitaire but it's hardly a turn off. Over time the subtle design elements also came into focus and we began to notice just how pretty the tablet was.
Despite the on/off switch getting stuck occasionally the overall design quality is very impressive considering this is quite possibly the cheapest tablet PC on the market. To add to the value, the notebook comes with a compact four cell battery as well as an enormous eight cell that will lift its backside. The smaller battery will keep you going for a couple of hours max at high performance while the big guy will last about 7-8 if used very sparingly.
It's not a bad first attempt at a Puma platform, the performance and consumption are impressive for the size, it's just a pity there was no XGP support for a little CrossfireX action. All in all, despite a rocky start the tx2530ea was a really impressive beast once you unraveled the layers of garbage it comes standard with. This is a great portable if you need a tablet, but a bad idea if you don't.
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