Seven Days With the HP Mini Note: Day 4

Author: J. Angelo Category: 7 Days with the Mini Note, HP Mini Note Tags: hp, mini note, vista, windows, xp

Tuesday
Jul 29, 2008

So I got to install Windows XP on the HP Mini Note as I wrote I wanted to, yesterday. Installation was a breeze. I had a USB combo drive which I got when I bought my Asus EeePC 701. The installation actually lasted a shorter time than I remember it did on my other computers. It was about an hour or so, including copying of files and actual setup.

I didn’t remove the Windows Vista Home recovery partition, so I can always just revert to default settings before returning the Mini Note. It is, after all, a review unit. That’s unless the next one in line would agree to receive the Mini Note with XP loaded.

As expected, XP is amazingly nimble on this machine. Startup is about 1 minute and 10 seconds. About 1 minute from cold boot to login screen, and another 10 seconds to load startup programs. Vista is, after all, a resource hog. Even with the 2GB RAM, the system has other bottlenecks that Vista simply cannot handle well.

So far, I would say that the HP Mini Note + Windows XP (or perhaps the Suse Linux version) + the 6 cell battery pack = great netbook.

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