Lora made her own Christmas this year: she bought herself an HP Mini 1033CL (10.2″ wide display, 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz N270 Atom processor, etc). And like a good brother I volunteered to test it out for her.
So here I am sitting on the back patio typing this blog post on her brand new HP Mini.
My general impressions so far? It’s nice.
The keyboard is wonderful. Almost feels fullsized even when it isn’t. The page up/page down keys are the ones I have the most trouble with (you need to press the Fn key to toggle the arrow keys to page mode), but most of the other keys seem to be in the right spot.
Performance is good. The device comes with Windows XP and boots relatively fast. I’ll put it another way, it boots much faster than my Samsung Q1 UMPC. There’s really no time to run off to the kitchen and cook a four course meal when it boots up. 🙂
The box comes with real recovery discs, not a recovery. Not doing this, at least to me, is like supplying a power adapter without a plug. Good job HP.
On the so-so side are:
The built-in .3M webcam is about what you’d expect from a low-resolution camera, but not what most people would call adequate. The quality is just not up to today’s standards.
The display has a little bit too much glare–especially outdoors. I have to place the display just right not to get too much reflection. I’m using 1024×600 mode which is pretty good for Windows though IE 8 sure takes up a lot of vertical space. I probably need to tweak its settings.
I’ve been having trouble with the wireless staying connected for more than about five minutes in XP. In a minute I’ll say how I’m getting around this.
The trackpad is not too bad although it is taking me a little time to get used to the buttons being on the right and left sides of the pad. I keep accidentally touching the pad area rather than the buttons and as a result ping the cursor to the edges of the screen at the most inopportune moments.
Battery life is OK. I’m not sure exactly, but it’s a little more than a couple hours. This is as expected since the Mini only has a 3 cell battery. I imagine a spare battery is a good idea for the heavy user.
So that’s the good and the bad. What have I been doing with the Mini? Well, experimenting with Windows 7 M3.
Sorry for those who love XP, but I’ve moved on and I just couldn’t stand it. So I installed Windows 7. I’m dual booting right now.
The process was easy. Using a copy of Windows 7 on a DVD, I booted up the Mini, pressed F9 to bring up the boot device menu, selected the external DVD, and started the Windows 7 install. When I got to the partition screen, I pressed Shift-F10 which brings up a command window in which I used Windows’ DISKPART utility to SHRINK the XP partition. I split the 60GB drive half. Then I formatted the new partition, and installed Windows 7 on it. That’s pretty much it. Windows 7 fixes up the boot sequence so you can pick from Windows 7 or XP. No special 3rd party tools needed.
Yes, Windows 7 boots a little slower than XP, but it’s not bad. I’m so pleased with the performance of Windows 7 in fact that I’m thinking about wiping out XP altogether.
I have had some driver issues, however. I haven’t been able to get the network controller working, though wireless is working perfectly. I also don’t have the special scrolling area on the trackpad working, but that’s not a noticeable loss to me. I’ve watched some YouTube videos and they seem OK, but I haven’t tried the mic. That may or may not be an issue.
Maybe Lora will post a more detailed recipe of how and what to install–though in short order I hope and expect to see the next beta of Windows 7 out and that’ll probably negate these instructions :-).
Oh, one BIG wish? I keep wanting to touch the screen. This device would be perfect with an N-Trig style dual digitizer that support pen input as well as capacitive multi-touch.