Testing Out the New HP Mini NetBook

I bought an HP Mini from my buddy Mike this week. He’s only had it about 6 months, but he switched to an iPad and didn’t need it any more.

It’s pretty cool. I can write a blog entry offline, edit and view it using Windows 7, before uploading it to the site. The new HP Mini Net Book is compact and light weight, which is cool. The keyboard is smaller than I’m used to and the spacebar doesn’t always work on the first try.

The battery life is about 7 hours. It actually goes into “sleep” mode when I close it, which saves power, and comes back up right away, exactly where I left off, when I want to resume what I was doing. It also comes with a built-in webcam and mic and came loaded with Skype and video editing software, which means I can do some vlogging (video blogging) for the site, as soon as I figure out how.

I’m writing this post with Windows Live Blogger, which is a lot easier to use than the Blogger (Blogspot) online format, but the software let me download my blog template, so that updating is pretty seamless. Placing pics is a little more free form, because it lets you place them anywhere in the post. It also gives you the cool drop shadow around the image.

The Blogger format is more limited than this and constantly fights me when I’m using FireFox and Google Chrome. For example, when using Firefox, when I press the enter key, the cursor sometimes jumps to another random part of the page. When I’m using Google Chrome, the enter key doesn’t work at all between paragraphs.  

I could learn to like this a lot.