Matt Whitlock said: Hi G-Box1, I'd recommend not posting your e-mail and phone number in a public forum. You can always give it to someone in a private message. If you wish to remove it from your post, hit the edit button. The TouchSmart Community developers area was initially intended to focus on the TouchSmart Desktop line of PCs. The tx2z caught us by surprise when HP branded it "TouchSmart." Try as we might, we've never been able to make inroads with the dept that handles the TX2 notebook. There's an SDK in our downloads area for programming apps to integrate into the suite on the desktop line, but that's currently not applicable to the notebooks. I will, however, attempt to answer some of your questions as best I can, or at least give you my thoughts. There are a few HP employees that stroll through the forums here from time to time that would probably be able to give you much more specific answers than I. "as “off the shelf” delivered is there a touch screen applications development environment installed or is there a separate touch screen development environment, will the development environment produce compiled, executable code and under what OS will it operate" As far as I know, programming an app for the tx2 wouldn't be any different than programming any Windows application designed to run on Windows Vista. I'm not aware of any programming environment specific to the TouchSmart. HP doesn't ship or support Linux on the tx2, but if you hang around the forums, I believe there are several discussions related to running Linux on the tx2z. "does HP offer RFID and card swipe options and what drivers are available " I don't know for sure, but this is a Windows PC. You could use anyone's third party peripherals as long as they support whatever OS you're using (i.e. Windows Vista or soon Windows 7). "does the touch screen support two finger touch and screen sweep as the iTouch ? " The screen is multitouch capable, but Vista doesn't natively support multitouch. Windows 7 will, and information for programming multitouch apps for Windows 7 should be well documented by MS. If you want to discuss this more with HP, have you tried their "for business" number? http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/contact/phone_assist.html#section3

Thanks for your response- I will heed your advice

dave Fisher