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!
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…)
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.)
I still have one, too! Found for $3 at a flea market because the HDD is going bad… and I can’t find a ZIF adapter that recognizes anything I plug into it. HP = custom pinout on the ZIF ribbon?
Hah! I didn’t expect anyone to know the psion one!
I really, really wanted one as a kid, but they were quite expensive. Like, actual-real-computer expensive, if I recall correctly.
The good news is the tech pretty much ended up in the S60 Nokia phones, of which I had uh, a lot. And some of them even had normal keypads, and not one from whatever meth-induced fever dream some guy in Finland had.