RANDOM REVIEW REVISITED – HP Mini 1000
I have owned my HP Mini 1000 netbook for just over seven months now, and it seems like as good a time as any to discuss my experience so far.
The original review can be read here.
WAS I A BETA TESTER?
It would appear that HP has corrected most, if not all, of the gripes that I had with my netbook. Newer models of the HP Mini 1000 now have three USB ports, a standard VGA output, and I believe the whole “Mobile Mini Drive” malarkey has been done away with as well. Big thumbs-up to HP for making those fixes, but they won’t be doing ME a whole lot of good anytime soon!
ITS SO SMALL AND KYOOT!
For all the press and hype, I don’t think Netbooks have become commonplace as of yet (not in San Antonio, anyway). I have personally only seen two other Netbooks “in the wild” myself, and my Mini garners the occasional stare when I am out and about with it. This usually leads into what has quickly become a prepared speech on the pros and cons of owning a Netbook.
Every so often I will get an “OMG ITS SO CUUUUTE!” from a woman, but I have yet to get any significant part of that attention thrown my way. *sigh*
CRASH BANG BOOM!
Its as inevitable as the tides; you WILL eventually drop your portable computer at some point in time. It happened to me in June, the Mini fell off of a countertop and the side smacked into a chair on the way down. Needless to say, I freaked out. Luckily, there appears to be no permanent damage, save for a nice dent in the speaker grille …so maybe NOW its not so cute! As a consequence, the battery now has a tendency to fall out at random times, but it wasn’t nothing a little electrical tape could’t fix!
WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN OS MAKES
I was intrigued by the thought of installing Windows Vista on my Netbook at first. Despite the optimizations and upgrades I had made to the Mini, Windows XP would still grunt and groan when running on the Mini’s modest hardware. I did some research and found a few reports saying that installing Windows Vista on a Netbook was an excercise in futility, and having had my own bad experiences running Vista on underpowered hardware, I decided not to try.
Meanwhile, the computing press was busy gushing over the Windows 7
beta, and I became intrigued again. On the surface, it sounded like madness: a newer version of a Microsoft operating system running better than the older one on underpowered hardware? Unpossible!
Actually it was VERY possible! I installed Windows 7 and the Mini felt much more responsive than it ever was under XP. The Aero effects work just fine despite Intel’s nearly-worthless graphics hardware, and tethering my smartphone to get on the Internet when I’m “off the grid” works without any intervention on my part. When Microsoft offered a discount on Windows 7 back in July, I jumped on it. I installed Home Premium and I have been very happy with it.
The Mini was pretty good with Windows XP, but it’s GREAT with Windows 7.
ULTRA-PORTABLE BLISS
I have found my netbook to be a great portable computer; it has enough power to do everything I need it to do when on the road, and upgrading the RAM to 2GB made Windows happy. I wish the battery life could be a bit longer, but except for that little gripe, I consider my HP Mini 1000 to have been a good purchase.
I would encourage anyone who needs a ultra-portable computer for basic tasks to look into purchasing a Netbook. The price is right, the performance is good, and the portability is great…just be sure you test out the keyboard first!
Mac and Me – VistaMac!
As it turned out, I had screwed up my Mac by trying to install a version of Windows that could not “see” the newly created Boot Camp partition. Thus, my retail boxed copy of XP was pretty much useless; I would need an XP Service Pack 2 disc.
Fortunately, I had one handy that I “borrowed” from one of my previous employers *evil grin* Sadly, it would not accept the retail license key I had, so I had to punt and install Vista instead.
My previous experiences with Vista were less than pleasant, but then again I was installing it on a two-year old machine. Vista just was not happy running on my Gateway’s single-core CPU and 1GB of RAM. Even after I bumped up the machine’s RAM to 2GB it plodded along, and I could hear the hard drive constantly crunching away while I computed.
I hoped that running it on more capable hardware would provide a better experience. I figured it should be happy running on a 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. Sure enough, everything went well except for having to sit for about two hours downloading and installing various updates.
I wonder if at some point does it just become cheaper to mail everyone update CDs? Bandwidth ain’t cheap!
Anyways, once the updates were done and the Mac drivers (and the anti-virus…sigh) were installed, Vista ran like a dream. After I got Vista up and running, it was really late, so I couldn’t do much else. Next, I will transfer my PC files over from the Gateway’s old hard drive onto the Mac.
That’s when things should get really interesting!