I have a Toshiba Portege 3500, and am totally in love with it!

No bugs/speed/compatability issues at all.

Why do you say that you would not use the handwriting recognition functions? You know that the Tablet PC edition is only available as a factory-installed O/S on a tablet PC--you can't get it for a regular laptop.

The tbalet mode is very helpful for document markup, drawing, sketching, and writing out workflows, provided you keep the data in ink format.

The handwriting recognition is OK, but you really don't want to write more than a quick paragraph. Either you want a convertible that you can flip into laptop mode for anything longer or you want to use speech recognition for something better than handwriting recognition for longer writing.