Reddit reviews Acer Iconia Tab W500-BZ467 10.1-Inch Tablet (Silver)

maybe. technology has gotten to the point where it can easily run a full fledged windows 7 OS on portable hardware. the problem is the UI. using windows 7 as a pure touch device is pretty cumbersome. from what i've seen of windows 8, they may actually solve this with a duality in the OS. the desktop is treated as an 'app' so you can have that when you want it. everything else is completely redesigned as a tablet UI. It could very well be an awesome 'do everything' device if they pair it with a form factor similiar to this.

but who knows. maybe desktop computing for consumers really is dying and people dont need things like photoshop, word processing, hardcore pc gaming, etc.

I used this tablet with linux.
It worked decently, but to get ambient light sensor and accelerometer readings, i had to apply some patches (and port them) and it would kinda work. Not reliably.
Bluetooth would also not work without a minor kernel patch.
Otherwise it worked good, decent 3d support from AMD and the touchscreen worked flawlessly, except i didn't try to do multitouch, but others seems to have had some success.

I used mostly enlightenment and using the keyboard and the mouse was a must for me as I spend most of my time mucking around in terminals.
YMMV with other distros.

I have Windows 8 installed on an Acer Iconia W500 tablet and it works flawless. As others have stated, the touch capability is enabled by default... your laptop simply isn't configured with capacitive touch capabilities.

Here is a video of the Windows 8 developer preview running with full touch capabilities on a Lifebook, so I imagine yours is pen input only (warning, video has horrible music).

Just moving around windows on my Iconia Tab W500, it seems very laggy. But this is the first build I tried, and this is kind of an old tablet (bought it with windows 7 on it, before 8 was Previewed.)

Edit: I guess you can still buy them on Amazon

I know people are working on getting Ubuntu to run on it. If you want a mainstream desktop OS, Acer has a a Windows 7 tablet that looks pretty nice.

^ this.

First to take from this is the CPU that your laptop is using. HP's documentation on it shows that the processor is an AMD E1-1500. Check out this chart for some comparison purposes:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html

Oh man. There's 6+ year old processors that went past that CPU. A friggin Netburst Pentium went past it. I'm not just ragging out your CPU, but I was bitten by a very similar one in my Acer W500 tablet and that came with Windows 7. Removed all the preinstalled cruft, popped Windows 8 onto it and it was a good deal smoother. Not buttery smooth but that's just how the system is. It works though.

You can probably go a little further if you put a solid state drive to replace your mechanical 320 GB drive but you'll ultimately be held back by your CPU first. Also there's the thing of reinstalling Windows 8 onto your new hard drive if you went this route. HP may have recovery discs but I don't know if your laptop comes with it. More RAM helps a bit but if you're doing light things, it won't show much of an impact.

What may help more is uninstalling most of the preinstalled apps. Get rid of the antivirus and preloaded software first. PC Decrapifier may help. http://pcdecrapifier.com/download

Windows 8 and 8.1 behaves faster than 7 on slower platforms though. My old tablet (W500) and a really old Pentium M series laptop did like 8 more than Windows 7. YMMV