First Day With The HP Mini 1109

8:07 Jun 15th, 2009 | 0 notes

If you’ve read my twitter recently, you’ll know I got an HP Mini 1109 on saturday!

Check my Flickr for random badly composed photos!

Well, after hours figuring out how to install Windows 7 (and then finding it was actually super simple) and finding the case I bought was too large, I finally got a chance to take it for a test drive!

I didn’t have much of a school day today, considering that my school orchestra was in an competition and we were away for four periods. But I can tell you that having the Mini with me for math, english and music (well maybe not math) was very promising!

First off, it’s by far the best looking netbook on the market at the moment. To me it’s very Apple-esque and goes great with my iPhone.

I forgot that I didn’t have a copy of Office before I walked off to school, which was somewhat annoying. I had to use the new WordPad in it’s place which was actually fine. I could do all the typing that I needed to do, considering I only needed to type out bullet points. I would seriously consider not buying Office and just downloading Star or Open Office as an alternative, because I’d rather not pay for software that is worth half the value of the entire computer.

I put it into hibernation when I wasn’t using it. With Windows 7, the days of waiting for three minutes for hibernation to set in are over! It takes just as long to hibernate as it does to sleep the machine, making it perfect for putting away for one or two periods before quickly booting it out of hibernation when you need it.

The Mini 1109 is very zippy. I didn’t ever find myself feeling like I was waiting for any lengthy amount of time for it to respond, something I was surprised about considering the slow Atom processor. The screen is great, everything fits well and I never felt in need of more space. Windows Aero UI works wonderfully, all the animations are smooth and fast. The small trackpad is calibrated to make it efficient enough for normal use. I’m still getting used to the track pad buttons being on the side, but that won’t take long. The keyboard is fantastic as well, I’m quickly getting used to it being 8% smaller that full size.

What does it need? I can say it needs to be a bit more energy efficient. The fan runs constantly after a while and I can’t imagine that being good for battery life. The speaker is also quite tinny, but that’s to be expected considering how tiny it is. On the sound devices front, Windows 7 doesn’t seem to recognize the inbuilt microphone. Again, just another little annoyance, but one I can live with. Other than that it work perfectly!

There you go, my brief review of the HP Mini 1109!

Next up, installing a Netbook OS! I’m thinking Moblin at the moment, at least until I can get my hands on Jolicloud.