Dell’s Latitude ST Tablet – how NOT to build a slate

I picked up a refurbed Dell ST from Dell’s outlet figuring it would be a nice little Win7 slate to go along with my aging Toshiba M400 convertible.  My M400 was a wonderful tool when I returned to SFSU to complete my computer engineering degree.  I used it to take notes, annotate PDFs from class, and complete homework.

I was in for a huge disappointment.  The ST is woefully underpowered with it’s Atom CPU and 2GB of RAM.  I have the 32GB SSD version. 

There are no buttons except power, volume, and a rotation lock. Get stuck on boot, need to “press any key,” “f1” or “f2” and don’t have a USB keyboard handy?  You’re out of luck! 

Compared to an iPad or Android tablet its slow, hot, has an inaccurate touch and pen digitizer.  If you want to run Aero, forget about doing anything else.  Switching Performance setttings makes it usable.

Windows 7 Experience index:

Processor: 2.2

Memory: 4.2

Graphics: 4.3

Gaming graphics: 3.0

Primary hard disk: 7.3

Toshiba M400 tablet, Windows 7 x64, and fingerprint reader

I struggled with this for quite a while.  No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the fingerprint software to recognize the reader on the Windows 7 x64 install (x86 works fine).  The drivers were installed, everything looked ok, but I would get a “fingerprint device not installed” error when launching the Upek Protector Suite software.

Turns out, Upek has a newer version out (Protector Suite 2009 for Windows 7)  and its free to download.  I uninstalled the driver and old software, rebooted, then installed the new Upek software, and lo and behold, the reader is recognized and I was able to add my fingerprints.