Results so far with the Toshiba Satellite R15.

The good:

- 14.1" screen is precisely the correct size. Can show an 8.5 x 11 chord chart at exact actual size in portrait mode.

- Doesn't have built-in bluetooth, but, the bluetooth dongle from the Pageflip Cicada Pedal works perfectly. Also it happens to work with my old MS bluetooth mouse, so I now also have a cordless mouse for it too.

- It has an SD card slot so I can synch/backup song charts with my other computers even when there's no wireless available.

- I've got my chord chart software pretty much working the way I want now. I can create/edit/reorder multiple set lists, using any document that Word can open. I've figured out how to put up the chord charts on the screen without any scroll bars or menus, and zoom them to fit the screen edge. Each page of the set list offers an "Edit" button that will let me edit and save the chord chart live in Word (using the stylus and the onscreen keyboard) and then it will automatically reinsert the edited song into the set in the correct spot. I can display the charts using any color scheme I like, choosing page background color and foreground text color. I can email a set list to another band member. It's all working perfectly now.

- I've now even got some holes cut on the back of the casing to slot the computer into a mic-stand attachment, so it can mount onto a mic stand, instead of precariously balancing it on a music stand. (The mic stand attachments that wrap around and grip tablets from the edges are all designed for ipads and aren't nearly big enough for a full laptop PC like this. I found a rare one that would go to 10 inches wide, which did fit the Motion Computing M1400 tablet, but not this Toshiba tablet.)

- Battery rundown is two solid hours on a third-party battery I purchased to go with it. Not great, but, I could simply have a second charged battery on hand for the second set.


The bad:

- It's a fairly heavy laptop, as laptops go. It's almost as heavy as the printed songbook it's trying to replace. Though not *quite* as bulky.

- The screen rez is only 1024 x 768. For chord charts where the font is condensed to fit the page, the text starts to get hard to read sometimes because the anti-aliasing features of the display engine are working too hard to make the fonts readable.

- When rotated into portrait mode, off-axis viewing of the LCD pixels themselves is tricky. LCD displays are optimized for landscape viewing, in terms of the pixel layout and orientation. So if you're looking at, say, black text on white or white text on black, when you view this display in portrait mode off-axis, everything turns into rainbows. I can correct for this by choosing to use green text on a black background, so there's no rainbow. But even then, there's issues with viewing the text off-axis: Some font sizes blur too much off-axis to read. That's a problem because me and Vixy use our charts off-axis: We put the music stand between us (so it's off to my right and off to her left) and keep an eye on it out of the corner of our eye, we don't put the stand directly in front of us.

That last one might still kill it. I'm going to play with display settings and see if I can improve things in that regard.