Well, after years of using various friends and family members computers, I got my first actual completely owned-by-me computer, Hp Mini 210-1171nr, pretty happy with the little guy all in all... though I had an aborted Ubuntu install (drivers wouldn't load up, then it all collapsed like a house of cards), and decided to go beat up windows 7 starter until I opened up everything I could myself... as I'm not exactly excited about the idea of paying more money into a blatant "here's a taste, wanna upgrade" scheme.

Got all the HP bloat uninstalled, went through and basically duplicated the tweaks guide from the Mini 311 forum post, and had a few scary regedit adventures (happily I learned many... many.... MANY years ago to back my system up before doing that sort of thing) before I finally figured out how to take ownership away from the default TrustedInstaller, a.k.a. my arch-nemesis.

Just going through and getting it all tweaked and set up to my tastes, planning out some future upgrades, more ram, pick up an SSD card at least to boot off of, that sort of stuff.... for now.


So, yeah, good to find some fellow geeks with a taste for these little computers... nice to see not everyone has fallen in for the tablet craze yet.

I paid $300 and tax for this thing, and I remember the first time I began paying attention to computer specs, late 90's or so... smoking fast 400 mhz systems with 64 megs of ram running at a blazing 100 mhz, massive 10 gig hard drives, hearing talk about DSL and other fat pipes being rolled out across the country, thinking about how awesome it would be to play Diablo on a big 17 or maybe 19 inch CRT, push it all the way up to 800 x 600 res and think about how awesome Duke Nukem Forever is gonna be...


Computer Technology Forecast, 1997 – 2011

They forecasted a $1000 to $2000 desktop in 4/03 having a 1.6 Ghz processor, possibly a 166 mhz bus, 1024 mb ram, 60 gb HD, 45 Gig graphics accelerator, possibly 3-D video and surround sound, 15 Gb CD, a 0.4 Mbaud modem, and a 1280x960 video camera with a RW storage device, presumably CD's because floppy discs aren't going to cut it. They mentioned parallel processors as a likely step, and systems on a chip with integrated audio/video, maybe even modems ran by software.


Suffice to say, seeing all those stats and better in a little $300 package was kind of a trippy moment after the flashback to the days of ZDtv I had in the store...