This is the most obvious April Fool's joke of them all

If you are looking for a touch screen, then the 12" screen requirement is going to make it hard to find. There just aren't that many systems out there that are touch (The Iconia W500, which I own and love, is one but you ruled it out because of a 10" screen) that are not windows 8 systems, and while win 7 MIGHT install on one of those, it also might not.

You could always do a windows 8 tablet with a windows 7 vm running at boot.

If a stylus is fine, then you have a whole sew of possibilities. I also own a gateway cx2750 running win 7 and I used it for meetings until very recently simply because the handwriting recognition in win7, once trained is simply amazing. It has the screen size and res you are looking for, but its not light. Of course I have the extended battery in mine, which makes hodling the damned thing a lot easier, even if it is heavier.

Windows RT and the Risc based surface were mistakes. If people wanted locked in, crippled computing devices, the iPad is better established. The ability to have a full computer would have been a great differentiator. Windows 8 on a full computer is great. I have an acer iconia w500 running full windows 8. Its great. It is what Surface should have been if MS could have pulled their collective heads out of their asrses.

At what point do we delineate the difference between historian and sociologist. Historians (not just history teachers who teach by rote) discuss the facts and trends of the society in the past, the sociologist the facts and trends of the present society, but from the time something happens, is digested and dissected and correlated, it is the past.

I am not even sure why modern browsers support frames anymore. I don't think I've seen a framed site since geocities shut down. There is absolutely no need for frames.

i disagree that itunes is valid for managing media. I have triedon numerous occassions to let it catalog my media library and it just chokes horribly. admittedly, not everyone has 65,000+ music files, but iTunes can't handle very large collections without barfing horribly.

You purchased rights for the standard def version of the movie, not the high def. Saying this is not piracy because you purchased the standard DVD is like saying that you have the rights to a Lincoln town car because you purchased a Ford Taurus. Same company, both are cars, one is much better than the other. You bought one, not the other.

william dot byrd (gmail) please?

Burn them!!!!

Its a shame that MS never figured out how to actually implement this. How many times do I have to restart my computer to finish applying update?

I have to second you on the Gateway tablets. I have the CX-2750. Same form factor. The now 2 year old batteries still give me about 3.5 hours on balanced power settings. Came with Vista, and was the only computer I have ever seen where Vista was not a POS, it was almost as if that machine was a reference system. Vista actually had slightly better pen tracking that windows 7.

For those who say that handwriting recognition is a trick and never works. I write on mine all the time, in cursive and it has no trouble with the recognition. I don't even remember the last time I had to correct it. Of course I have extremely good handwriting, and I did spend 20 minutes training it when I installed windows 7 on it. All in all, except for the weight, its the best computer i have ever owned.

I played this special last year for my (then) 5 year old son who is a Star Wars freak (probably knows almost as much as the old man, and when I told him that one day, he simply replied "Now *I* am the master" ). About 20 minutes into the show, he came to me and asked me to turn it off. Asked me if I could put something else, anything else on tv. It was that bad.

Its not a little irrelevant thing. If Farmville is important to a lot of people, and it works only in the most broken browser on the planet, then Farmville is more relevant that even "standards". We, the slashdot crowd, are not indicative or the general population. What we thinks is superior, and how we think things should be done is what is irrelevant. This is why Linux is still marginal. It is done the way we think things should be done, not the way the majority of people think it should be. I thought that a netbook was great for the wife to use check email, do the bills, etc, but the screens on just about every netbook around were too low res to adequately run the flash stuff on the Webkinz site. That was important to her, so that meant that even though I would prefer to think of Flash as irrelevant, and even though I know there is little that can be done with flash that could not also be done using open standards, the point is that she bought the HP mini 2133 because it was a netbook with a full 1280x800 screen, ran windows XP and had a good solid, stable, up to date flash player. That was the only reason she got that system. It was the only reason we paid $100 more for a netbook, but it was what an average consumer wanted, and therefore was much more relevant than the arguments that "its running windows instead of a free OS", "but you don't need your excel spreadsheet to do the bills, you can use OO.o", or "Flash is just crap". What the consumer wants beats "standards", what the consumer wants beats technical superiority, what the consumer wants is relevant.

Unless you post with your account, and the UID is lower, we assume you are just another high-UID idiot posturing as an old timer. Just sayin.

You obviously do not use Vista, as the voice recognition, and handwriting recognition for that matter, are two of the very few things in Vista that work well. You may have to train it for an hour for it to be 99% or so, but it was 95%+ OOTB when I was speaking to it. I can, however, still type much faster than I can talk, which is probably the only reason I do not use it.