I have been lurking on this board since the tablets came out, hoping against hope
that one day I would be able to justify the purchase of one of my own.

That day has come. It was a toss up between the good old workhorse, the HP
nc6000, and the Acer c303xmi. The additional 512mb ram, 80 gig drive and dvd
burner-- for only about 96$ more, really sealed the deal for the 303xmi. Yeah,
I'd get a strong machine and a tablet to boot.

Well, despite the fact that I have never worked with any acer products before, and
wasn't really thrilled with the limited warranty, I decided to go for it. I paid
for two day shipping, and voila, it's here.

I took it out of the box, and first thing I noticed is the screen doesn't line up
properly to latch in tablet mode. It is slightly off to the right, and you have
to sort of shift it over to get it to lock.

Then, during the setup process, a large keyboard popped up onscreen and obscured
most of the
display. I had to keep moving it around to actually see the text and fill in the
fields properly. This keyboard disappeared after the reboot (or two) that was
required before the system actually moved into the operating system for the first
time.

When it actually booted up to a desktop, and I clicked through the tablet stuff
that loaded, I decided to try messing with the stylus. I flipped the screen
around, snapped it down (with a jiggle), it changed from landscape to portrait,
and I started writing....
....then it flickered, then it shifted back into landscape, then portrait....

....I think you get the picture. Is that a common problem with the C300 series,
303s in particular? Did I just get a bad machine (figures, that is my luck)? It
seems to "short out" if I hold onto the bottm left side (in portrait mode, hinge
to the right) of the laptop while I write. Also, if I tip the laptop while
writing, it spontaneously shifts from one mode to the other, but not back.

In addition, it seems to darken and lighten the display spontaneously as I move my
hand over the "rim" of the screen as I write (I am left handed). What's with
that?? The screen does not move, there's not a cloud in the sky, yet the it seems
to be responding to lighting changes that do not exist....

Please, could someone give me an idea of whether or not the thing is broken (it is
now almost three hours old) and needs to be sent back or if there is a patch, fix,
or tweak that will make the issue go away.

I was so looking forward to getting my own tablet...

--

-callahan



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-callahan