I am using a Wacom Graphire on my desktop machine and I am happy with it.
The Wacom Intous is also quite popular. The one feature to look for is that
the manufacturer provides a HID-compliant driver for the device. Otherwise
it's just another mouse-device without the additional pen features such as
pressure-sensitive ink.

The folks in the developer newsgroup
(microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc.developer) may have some more suggestions
on external tablets. You might want to start a thread over there and poll
them for their experinces.

Thanks,
Stefan Wick
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"Jonathan Sachs" <llm040903@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:mur9015mr35a3r51s39evaddk3tf6se508@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 06:34:11 -0800, "Stefan Wick[MS]"
> <swick@online.microsoft.com> wrote:
>
>>b) you don't need special hardware to use recognition. It will work with
>>the
>>mouse. Using an external drawing Tablet is highly recommended, though.
>
> You've touched on another question I want to ask, so I will ask it
> here instead of in the other thread I started.
>
> Do you have any suggestions for choosing a graphics tablet? Particular
> features to look for, or characteristics to avoid? Minimum size for
> useful work? Any brands or models you have found to work particularly
> well?
>
> My email address is llm040903 at earthlink dot net.