Tablet PC for cleanroom equipment monitoring

[Mn-Brent]

I am looking at putting a tablet PC into a semiconductor manufacturing cleanroom and mounting it onto a wall. It would be permanently powered by AC and use RS232 to communicate with a piece of equipment. This is a pet project for my work group-definitely not a profit deal.

Anyone have any recommendations/experience with these?

What tablets are well received?
What about mounting possibilities?
Is there a standard for mounting?

Appreciate any replies.

Best Regards, Brent......

[glc]

You may be limited by the fact that less and less notebooks, much less tablets, no longer have any serial ports. They are all going over to USB-only.

[Mn-Brent]

I have noticed this. I would probably use PC card-RS232 or USB-RS232 converter. Not my first choice, but is the lesser of two evils maybe in this case. That evil being a slow, large, expensive, not well recieved, industrial touchscreen PC.

A tablet PC would be just perfect w/ better performance. The industrials are usually very slow (300-400Mhz), with Win95 OS.

Still appreciate any advise on this one.

Best Regards, Brent....

[glc]

The only tablets I've worked with are Acer and Toshiba convertibles. I'm not impressed with the quality of either, especially the Acer. It's quite fragile.

[kram 2.0]

Tablets, IMO, have gone a long way. The newer tablets I use (Toshiba Tecra M4) is a bit flimsy, but not as bad as it was with the older tablets (Toshiba Protege 3500 - bad model). In addition, the Tecra M4 works as a decent simple laptop.

And as something I've noticed - you may not see this as much since you're mounting the tablet, but the special tablet pens get lost quite easily and they are fairly expensive to replace.

kram

[glc]

I see Lenovo has a convertible tablet now - if anybody can make a good one, they can. Just saw the ad on TV.