HP Mini Netbook

It has been more than seven months since I have joined SERP and it has took seven months for the organisation to provide me with a laptop err.. a netbook. My experience with netbooks was limited to nandy's Samsung and occasional  flirting with HCL-Me procured at a very pleasant price by SERP's ICT team for distribution to tens of thousands of SHGs of the state. Given the shoddy performance of both these units I wasn't particularly excited when I got a call from procurement section asking me to collect my office lapie. But I was for a surprise !! HP Mini has earned a well deserved appreciation from me.

First let's go through the specs

• processor : Intel Atom 1.67 GHz
• RAM : 1 GB
• HDD: 320GB
• Resolution: 1366 x 768

HP Mini's design is in line with other HP products, a very sleek and beautiful finishing in black matte. However keyboard is perhaps too minimal with END and HOME keys missing and function keys given as secondary alternatives to multimedia toggles. This is uncomfortable for persons used to the hot-keys in MS Office and other applications. My machine is preloaded with Windows 7 starter edition which boots to the home screen in about twenty seconds. I haven't installed any heavy applications so far. Nonetheless Office 2010 pro plus works excellent. One great feature is the No-OS to web and media a la the much expected Chrome OS. While booting the system we can set it to go directly to the HP minimal OS, which will wait for a few seconds for our mouse gesture in the absence of which Windows will load spontaneously. It has an amazing battery back up of more than six hours and I am really enjoying the new found freedom these days !