HP Mini User (dot) com

When it comes to ultra-portable style notebooks sometimes its the little tweaks that will make the user experience much, much nicer. When it comes to the Mini-Note, and I say this with some experience as compared to the Eee PC and Cloudbook, but the Mini-Note “out-of-the-box” is much more user friendly, but does still have some issues.

The display on the Mini-Note is 8.9-inches and when compared to the Eee or Cloudbook it seems much larger as compared to their 7-inch display. Which aside from the 1.9-inches of extra real estate you also have a much higher resolution on the Mini-Note.

The Mini-Note has a screen resolution up to 1280 x 768, which is incredible as compared to the 800 x 480 on the others. However with that comes some extra eye strain, so a quick tip, aside from lowering the screen resolution will make the viewing experience a little easier on the eyes.

Change the overall font size

• Open Control Panel
• Click on the Personalization icon
• Then in the left hand column, click “Adjust font size (DPI)” and click Continue
• This opens DPI Scaling
• Switch from the default of 96 DPI to the “Larger scale (120 DPI) - make text more readable”
• Click Apply and then OK

Let me start by saying that I am primarily a Mac user, which means that aside from OS X I am very familiar with Windows XP, and fairly comfortable with Linux. However aside from playing around a few times with Vista running under Parallels on my iMac and setting up a Dell Vista machine for my parents the experience is next to nothing.

When it came to my Mini-Note purchase I wanted to get the faster processor and have the notebook come with the 2GB of RAM pre-installed so that meant opting for the $749 model with Windows Vista Business installed. So aside from getting used to the notebook itself, its been a little bit of a challenge with Vista.

Overall I like Vista, well I don’t hate it is most likely a better statement but I don’t think it’s as bad as I had heard. I hate to make a rash or quick decision but I may like it better than XP.

A few things that I have had to change, well actually fix is the login and sleep issues. I am not sure if this is a notebook issue or something with Vista but I was forced to login in each time I turned on or woke the computer from a sleep state. Which although they only took a few extra seconds, I am impatient and it turns out that they were both easy fixes. So just in case anyone else is in the same boat as me, I thought I would share the fix.

Boot without a login:

• Open the Start menu and click Run
• In the Run field, type netplwiz, then click OK and Continue
• This will open up User Accounts and on the Users tab there will be a checkbox towards the top
• Uncheck the box next to “Users must enter a username and password to use this computer”
• Click Apply, then OK

Wake from sleep without a login:

• Open Control Panel
• Open Power Options
• In the left side column, click “Require a password on wakeup”
• Click the link that states “Change settings that are currently unavailable”
• Click the “Don’t require a password”
• Then click the Save Changes button