[SC.LUG] Recommended 'mini' laptop.

[Ian molton]

Im fairly happy with me eee 1000. it can be a bit sluggish, but thats 
the atom just being pants...

the hp mininote is very nice (I helped a friend pick one out) but DONT 
buy it unless you enjoy proprietary drivers. the video performance is 
pathetic on the open drivers. The screen is not good quality (poor 
colour purity) however the resolution is great and the 1280x800 is 
*noticeably* nicer to use than 1024x600.

I run debian on both these machines, and the mininotes VIA CPU is much 
better (and its battery life much smaller, mostly due to it having a 
miniscule battery).

Astonishingly the mininote keyboard is very useable, despite its size 
and my big hands/fingers.

My preference? The eee1000. but _purely_ because I can use 100% open 
drivers on it and because of its astonishing (for x86) battery life.

The mininote would be a close second if it had open drivers, but the 
frankly _crap_ openchrome or via video drivers completely ruin a machine 
which (other than battery life) could have been an eee-killer.

Also HP should be shot for providing a power-brick thats fully 1/3 the 
size of the laptop! WTF?! the eee power brick is tiny, but I rarely take 
it out of the house because the 4-8 hours (depending on load) that I get 
from it totally removes the need for me to take the charger with me.

the Eee keyboard is a bit cheap and nasty - having removed it about 4 
times, it now is not reliable and ffrequently double-enters my 
keypresses. I guess if you never disassemble the machine this would be a 
non-issue.

Also dont expect the Eee bluetooth to be much use for long range (3-5m) 
EDR data (like to a bluetooth HiFi adapter) because its located beneath 
where your hands rest when typing which destroys the signal. I cut the 
antenna and soldered on a section of wifi card coax, which I threaded 
through the hinge into the screen area, and bared the last ~3cm of, 
which has much improved bluetooth reliability at that range.

the nex generation of these mini laptops will be very exciting, as I 
expect we're going to start seeing more high-performance non-x86 
compatible models dropping out of china / korea soon.

-Ian