[Wolves] HP Mininote 2133 for £200

[Adam Sweet]

On Sun, 2009-03-08 at 16:41 +0000, Claire wrote:
> This might be a silly question, but why don't you go for a cheap 2nd 
> hand laptop instead? You would get better performance and bigger screen 
> perhaps for less money.

I already have a monstrously big laptop, so as Kevan said, I want a
netbook for a 'throw in the bag and take anywhere without thinking about
it' web browser and SSH client (I'm a Linux sysadmin). I bought the Dell
Mini 9 but the keyboard is too small for me to type on and the screen is
just a little bit too pokey to be comfortable.

Aside from this, I unexpectedly had some spare cash for a month (though
I'll need to find it again by next month) and wanted to play with a new
toy. It was an impulse buy (I already have 4 other laptops), but I'm
very happy with it so far. I might try to recoup some of the money by
selling the Mini 9 (it won't be a at a radically cut price if anyone was
thinking of asking :).

Incidentally for anyone thinking of buying the Mininote, the CPU
frequency scaling fix worked, but it seems there is no 3D, multi-head or
MPEG2 or MPEG4 acceleration support with the default openchrome graphics
driver (open source, non-manufacturer supported). However both the
proprietary (alpha quality) and open source (in beta) drivers from the
manufacturer are said to be poor quality, unstable and the MPEG2/4
acceleration requires the playback application to run as root which is
pretty nasty security wise and damn inconvenient in practical usage.

http://www.openchrome.org/trac/wiki/About

There are no drivers from the manufacturer for 9.04 yet without frigging
the 8.10 driver to ignore the kernel version, so I think I'll stick with
2D and unaccelerated MPEG2/4 playback for now.

Regards,

Adam Sweet

-- 

http://blog.adamsweet.org/