Good news for those you wondering about XP on the Mini-note
Looks like running XP on your Mini-note is pretty awesome on the Mini-note. I’m sure HP had their hands tied by MS and had to offer Vista at first…
From the HP “Invent” BIOS screen to usable WinXP desktop: 35.72 seconds
From the “Windows XP” loading screen to usable WinXP desktop: 25.56 secondsNot too shabby! I have not really tweaked XP either - this is a standard install with my normal trimmings (Gmail Notifier, Nod32, S3 Video Tray, etc). It’s not bloated, but I made no efforts to trim it down. This is the 5200 rpm HDD as well - those of you with the 7200 rpm should notice faster boot times.
Movies play fine in XP, guys! I’m not sure about HD, but all of my normal 600 - 900 MB movie files play GREAT! They do skip a little when playing over the WLAN, but that probably has to do with my crappy wifi network. Running local from the HDD they’re perfect. CPU load is around 30 - 35% when playing a movie. “Contact” is playing in the background right now as I type this.
I have mine working with everything installed now too. This thing is incredibly snappy. I was actually going to return it because SuSe worked like crap. I had a lot of stuttering issues when I was typing and things were buggy and crashed a lot. I have absolutely no issues now in XP. The Wifi light even works now (sad that it doesn’t even work with the default OS).
Even the screen seems so much better. The default SuSe theme had really big icons and weird text and Windows doesn’t have any of these problems.
I get 2 hours of battery life in both linux and XP. It’s actually quite fast in XP…I’m surprised. I’ve installed Office Ultimate 2007 and it loads that up quicker than my Tablet PC that’s running a Core 2 Duo processor! Right now I’m running Rhapsody, Word 2007, Pidgin, Yahoo Widgets, Internet Explorer, and Google Talk on it at the same time and it seems fine. It’s still with the base 1 gig ram and 120 gig 5400 HDD, so you guys shouldn’t worry–this machine has enough power. Coming out of sleep is fast too, and boot-up is about 40-45 seconds. The only thing I’ve noticed is that the fan stays on most of the time. Very rarely does it become silent. Not a huge deal but something to be aware of.
I’m seriously thinking of selling my slooowww HP 2710p tablet and keeping this as my main laptop…hmmmm
This is great news and alleviates pretty much all my worries about the device.
Want to install XP in your Mini-note? Check out our guide
