LGR retrospective on the HP Mini 1000, one of the more popular PCs from the short-lived era of the netbook! If you could even call it an era. In hindsight, it was all a bit silly, even though the 45nm processors making it possible were quite exciting at that point in time. So join me in reviewing the Mini 1000 that I had back in 2009 (or close to it) and putting it through its paces 16 years later!
Really wish netbooks would make a return.
I used one of these throughout uni. Was great for fitting on small “tables” in lecture halls and you could throw it in your bag without worrying about it. Speed was not its strength…
Man, I had one of those. And I hated every minute with it.
It was, by far, the slowest “modern” computer I ever used, and I legit do not miss the whole netbook thing with slow-ass atom CPUs and the world’s slowest hard drives.
(They probably would have been far less awful with a more modern SSD option, but well, that wasn’t a thing soooo…)
The 12" MacBook was more or less a revival of this, but with actually fairly good hardware vs the cheapest shit they could slap together.
One of those machines, but with an iPhone CPU (not even the full M1) would be killer. Outstanding battery life, more than enough horsepower to casually browse the web, and well I guess that’s it. If only the modern web wasn’t so hideously bloated.
I don’t think you’d need to use an A-series SOC, considering the power usage of even a M4 is basically a rounding error - and they’ve already got M-series stuff running passively jammed into a tiny case anyways.
I’d be on something like that immediately, but I somehow doubt Apple will ever make a 12" Macbook ever again, given that the majority of people seem to like the 13" airs just fine.
Love to be wrong, though.
Oh yeah? When I were a lad we didn’t have netbooks with them fancy Atom chips with their la-de-da x86 ISAs.
We made do with the psion netbook.
(I didn’t have one)
I still have one!
It’s broken because it was designed by crazy people.
(The battery is required, the battery failed in such a way that it leaked and ate everything on the battery charger/temperature board, so uh, I have to find a replacement controller board and then put a new battery on it and I have to admit I just haven’t been motivated enough to try to find a non-destroyed board from a tiny production run that’s like 30 years old now.)
Hah! I didn’t expect anyone to know the psion one!
I had one of the early EEE PCs that came with XP. However, I replaced the OS with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which was really great.
I loved that formfactor
i looooved the netbooks. they were perfect for my use case
Same, shame really, had tablets not decimated that market segment they probably would have been fantastic with modern hardware lol
I had an Asus eeepc, forgot which one though. Had some shitty Nvidia card that was making the fan run non-stop in Linux. Had to completely shut it off with some strange command line magic.
they were really great for running kali on and crackin local wifi. i didnt pay for internet for years
