So,  for about 8 months now I've been using a new laptop. My old baby, Aulis served me well, but two years near constant abuse was not very kind to the poor thing. The power connection on it is very fragile, so Aulis is a backup PC and remains stationary for the most part.

I currently work on a new tablet I've nicknamed Eris, another Toshiba, this time of the Portege line, since the satellites were discontinued.


Model: Toshiba M700 Portege Tablet PC
4GB ram,  2.2 GHZ dual core, 100 GB hard drive ect. ect.

This darlin' is much faster than my old laptop. I learned to deal with Visa, and all of its associated annoyances that are supposed to make your PC safer and all that jazz. I've discovered this to be a slight pile of crap, since I got a virus on the thing that I just can't seem to shake (irritatingly). Luckily all it seems to do is turn all my ads when I browse the internet into ads for viagra and 'male enhancement', which is annonying, but I can't afford to get it sent away during the school year - It's way too esential for me.

I felt a bit betrayed by my anti-virus actually.  I used Bitdefender for two years on Aulis, it never had so much as a sniffle that wasn't detected and immediately terminated by Bitdefender - and I was much less careful with my downloads than I am now. Such is life I guess.

That aside I am mostly happy with this machine. The heat dissipation on it is fantastic, and it runs at a pretty fair clip for anything I want to do. It's almost a kilo lighter  as well - A huge advantage since I lug it everywhere with me. Importantly, I can run Painter X with almost no trouble at all, although i don't actually have very much time to play around in Painter.

The comic is done pretty much entirely in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009, which is about $100 and perfect for my needs drawing and sketching wise. What weirds me out though, is that Sketchbook takes in the pen pressure data from the tablet screen perfectly, while painter can't seem to recognize it for crap. If I'm going to get serious about using painter, I'm going to have to get this resolved. Inked and greyscaled pages go straight to painter, because Painter is much more sophisticated when it comes to dealing with things like image resolution and converting to .gif and .jpeg files than Sketchbook is. Sometimes I'll use painter to lighten or darken certain panels if I feel that I didn't get the greyscale quite right the first time around.

I'm really looking forward to doing some real painting in Painter soon - I've got a piece planned that I think I can actually pull off, but I'm still not totally comfortable with the huge variety and selection of brushes available, and figuring out what to use and when.

My major complaint is that the pen calibration is not totally perfect. I think it's a function of the included touch screen, but I can't get the pen to calibrate so that the actual cursor lies directly under the pen point. It's annoying, but I've gotten used to it..

Progress: 31 Pages complete.
(My buffer is very, very slowly coming back. I want to be at least 4 weeks ahead before I start thinking about double posting )