Windows-Free Tablet PC

A couple o’ months ago a friend asked me for a recomendation for a good laptop for college. He wanted something inexpensive, highly portable, flexible, and preferably Windows-free. Well, if I’d known about the Element 2100 at the time, I might have recommended he at least take a look. The specs on this laptop are pretty impressive for the price; 14″ screen and internal 30 gig hard-drive, 256 megs of RAM expandable to 1 gig, USB 2.0 ports, memory card reader and optional internal WiFi. Best of all it’s a tablet PC, which means that the screen is a touch-screen and can be rotated to cover the keyboard, or used like a standard laptop. It ships with Licoris GNU/Linux instead of Windows too, which saves cost and reduces threat of system failure. The whole thing comes in under 5 lbs. and is relatively slender. The downsides are that it does not seem to have an internal optical drive and the VIA 1GHz processor seems a little under-powered. More RAM wouldn’t hurt either, but maybe that’s not as much of an issue if you’re not running that old bloatOS.

Those willing to take a chance on this unit can get it for around $1000, but you might want to wait until a few reviews show up, especially ours.