Tablet PC or Laptop with Wacom Tabet?

[GluedOnBeard]

With me going back to uni in september I am in the market for a laptop, however looking at tablet pc's are they any good to draw on if they have a wacom digitizer?

If I am to get any tablet PC it would be:

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=19649&category_id=502&manufacturer_id=0

Does anyone here own a tablet pc or give me any advice, or it would be better to go for a normal laptop and just buy a wacom tablet seperate, bearing in mind I would only go for an A5 tablet?

Oh and also could that tablet run Maya ok?

Thanks

[sadat]

Get a Wacom Bamboo One and try that out first - they're only £40 new, so shouldn't be very much at all second hand from eBay. I've got one of them to work just fine with my old laptop, and it does the trick for messing around with Inkscape and making very simple graphics for work / website stuff on the cheap. I don't see how having a big A5 tablet would be any better than the smaller Bamboo One I've got, having used that. A little tip: Windows does auto-detect the tablet and it will work with standard Microsoft drivers, but is a LOT more usable with the Wacom drivers.

Also I'm a bit twitched by having a laptop with a touch-sensitive screen; all my PDAs end up dying painfully after a few years and I can't be having my laptop playing up.

No idea about Maya / more professional stuff, I'm just messing around on mine!

[GluedOnBeard]

Thanks, I eventually went with a Wacom Intuos3 A5, it has ended up being perfect for what I want to do which is pretty much all the artwork behind my games ideas. It is taking some time to adjust to drawing on a tablet again and getting used to the levels of sensitivity but so far so good

So as you can tell I went with a laptop also, went with the Dell XPS M1530 and can not say one bad thing about it especially as I saved about ?200 at the time, the tablet is great for making paths in illustrator then importing into maya, think I maybe could have managed with the Bamboo fun but its also nice to have all the hotkeys etc.

I did also get to try the tablet and I know what you mean, it would be nice to have one as a secondary ultra mobile solution but never as a main system.