[Brian]

Originally Posted by BobR

Tablet PCs seem to be the future for me. But do they make screen protectors for them? On my pda or laptop, if I touch the screen it starts to get grimy. With a PDA screen protector, I can use my fingers on the screen and it doesn't seem to pick up grime. That would make a tablet pc much more appealing to me because I wouldn't have to worry about getting the bottom of my hand all over the screen when I write (which is what I do on paper.)

Bob,

Check out NuShield. They make screen protectors for at least one Tablet PC, the HP-Compaq TC1000. If they don't have a screen protector you're looking for, you can contact them at support[at]nushield.com with the exposed screen size you need, they might have an existing die sheet size or could produce it if there is adequate demand. The Nushield protectors work very well, I have them for my Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 and my wife's Alphasmart Dana Wireless.

Then I could start thinking about a scanner and going paperless. I've got lots of files of paper at the office that are mostly just for reference. Lots of handwritten pages and copies of tech articles as well as many MS Office and Lotus notes documents generated by others I work with. If the scans were halfway decent (to allow me to mark up and pass on to a coworker without embarrassement), I'd love to go paperless.

One device that didn't catch on at the time, and was ahead of its time IMO, was the HP Capshare 910 & 920 handheld e-copier. They're going for a mint these days (considering they went for around $300 when they were readily available about 4 years ago) with a lot of demand by people using them for legal document research in law libraries and for doing real estate work such as looking up deeds. It's perfect for capturing handwritten notes, magazine articles, clippings, etc as you describe and that's exactly how I use my 920.

But the other problem (above and beyond the time to scan them all) is that keeping documents electronically probably requires a lot of disk and backup systems for large amounts of data don't seem to be cheap and convenient. Hmm.. wonder if writable DVDs would be adequate for document accumulations in electronic form?

Anyone else have any thoughts about what it would take to go paperless without regrets?

Here's my current plan (subject to modification) for my migration from paper to digital:

1. Use my PDA more and get my wife a PDA to share to-do lists, appointments, shopping/grocery lists (Handyshopper rules!), etc.
2. A good handheld capturing device like the CapShare, Mobile Note Taker, Seiko SmartPad2, Crosspad, etc.
3. Lots of hard drive space and a DVD-R/RW.
4. A good flatbed scanner with OCR software. When documents are captured (see #5) and text converted using OCR, they will be indexed using a program like Copernic Desktop Search for universal searching.
5. Plenty of time to convert/archive all existing paper documents into digital format (this will be the worst part ). I'll probably convert everything to PDF for portability between platforms and easy conversion to Repligo format.
6. Like you said, a Tablet PC would be an option if you want to cut down on steps 2, 4&5.

I'm currently between steps 3&4.

Brian