HP Mini 1000: The Windows XP Netbook 16 Years Later
[atomized jazz music plays] [computer buzzes, beeps] - I can about guarantee there's some memories cropping up for many of you watching this. Yeah, greetings and welcome to this LGR thing looking back at the HP Mini 1000, which was one of the most popular laptop computers in 2009, though specifically it was categorized not as a notebook, but a netbook! A subcategory of subnotebook, sort of a rebrand of the UMPC concept, but it was also a distinct and successful product category for a fleeting few years. But 2009 in particular is when they were really taking off as their own thing, along with increasingly smaller and thinner notebooks and mini laptops, just looking through this list of top 10 most popular laptops of 2009 according to CNET, and of course the Mini 1000 was one of the top options.
And there's a couple of reasons that I want to cover this thing. For one, I had one back when it was new! For me, this was a pretty special little computer. For one, it was the very first time I'd ever had or even used an SSD, which was still pretty fresh in 2009. And it was also just the first laptop computer that I had bought on my own at 22 years old. And I actually used it and its terrible little webcam to record some B-roll footage for some of my earliest LGR episodes. It was baaaad, arguably even worse than the converted VHS footage that I was using for my A-roll.
But you know what, I wanted to make use of it. It was a fun little thing that I just enjoyed for, again, a very short amount of time. We'll get to that. As for the netbook category itself, let's discuss that for a moment because it's a class of machines that rapidly went from exciting and new to boring and played out with overall interest from computing enthusiasts remaining low for a long time. And then looking back here 16 years later, it's almost beginning to be interesting again.
And you know what? I just haven't used one in so very long, so let's revisit the netbook a little bit. Not a complete history, we'll dive into things deeper whenever I finally cover the first ASUS Eee PC. But for now, just the term itself, right? It's supposed to be a notebook computer with a heavy focus on internet usage... NETbook. Eyehh, it's a term with a somewhat dubious origin, but it was roughly used from 2007 to 2013 with really 2008 being when it more or less fully caught on in advertising and marketing and the media at large. - And this is the newest.
They call them, or a lotta people are calling them, netbooks because they're really great for logging onto the internet, checking your email. They focus on small size, portability, and low cost. This runs Windows XP on the Intel Atom 1.6 gigahertz processor. That Atom processor is what makes this thing tick.
Less power, less heat, and more battery life. - And this iteration of the term really came about with the introduction of Intel's Nettop and Netbook form factor devices at the spring 2008 Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, part of, or at least adjacent to, their Mobile Internet Device venture with the processor projects code named Silverthorne and Diamondville leading to what became the Intel Atom CPUs with the ones early on being the Atom N270 and N280 processors, which were ultra-low voltage and high battery life, compared to Intel Core series things, at least. Built on the latest at the time 45-nanometer process with just a two and a half watt TDP as described in this video with an Intel executive in 2008. - In January, we introduced the 45-nanometer technology and 45 nanometer is allowing us to go into new segments, new markets.
One market that we're very excited about is something we call the netbook. You can see that it's a- - Very small chip! - Very small chip. Based on 45 nanometer, low power, sufficient performance, very low cost. It'll enable sub-400 US dollar netbooks. - And this all allowed for what to me was perhaps the biggest selling point is that they ran a full version of Windows. With Windows XP in particular being the choice for pretty much all of 'em early on and extending that operating system's life a bit more than Microsoft perhaps wanted.
If the different stories from back then are true about them limiting XP licenses to systems with one gigabyte of RAM or less. Pretty much what you saw every netbook at in stores, and arguably contributed to their less-than-stellar reputation. But there were plenty of people who bought them at least for a couple or few short years before the form factor rapidly died off. A topic that is very common on YouTube. That's a fascinating topic I'd like to revisit at some point, but not right now because we have the Mini 1000 here! And as for me and what got me interested in the form factor in the first place, well it was the ASUS Eee PC that I first remember seeing. And it was initially Linux based, which was pretty interesting looking back, but not to me at the time.
Once they started running Windows XP, that's when they got my full attention. I've always been a sucker for full Windows on a tiny system. But the Eee PC, I was like... [in a southern accent] "Who is ASUS? The motherboard manufacturer? "Nah, gimme a real brand like Hewlett-Packard!" And then right beside it at a local Best Buy store, there it was, an HP Mini 1000 Series.
Mine in particular being the 1116NR model. And there were a number of them, not all of them branded HP. In fact, there was the Compact Mini 700 as well, which HP and Compaq by that point were the same company, so whatever.
But anyway, the Mini 1000 I got was on sale for less than $300, an irresistible price to me. So I got it in April of 2009 as evidenced by this registration email that I still have from HP back then. And I thought it was awesome until I didn't. And then I sold it just months later that September, which again, evidence being my message from eBay saying that it successfully sold for just over 200 bucks. Yeah, there's reasons I fell outta love with this thing pretty quickly back then.
But one thing that I really did like actually was the SSD. Again, this is the first time I'd had, or used, a solid state drive like this. Though unfortunately the model of Mini I have here for this video uses a traditional 4,200 RPM laptop hard drive. A really small one, 1.8 inch, but still spinning rust.
Of course, that meant way more space, 80 gigabytes in this case as opposed to the 16 gig SSD. But I would take improved performance over the capacity every day of the week on a system like this, which is otherwise equipped with the same stuff that mine had, which meant an Intel Atom N270 CPU at 1.6 gigahertz, one gig of DDR2 RAM upgradable if you so desire, and [chuckles in page file] pretty much everyone did so desire! And otherwise just your basic internal chipsets for sound and integrated Intel graphics with the 950 Series shared memory GPU, which outputs to a 10.1 inch LCD with a very glossy finish.
I often prefer matte, but it does make that 1024x576 resolution look lovely. On that note, also looking pretty good is the overall aesthetic of the thing, I think. It's very rounded and soft and appealing to look at for the style of machine. And even the lid has a bit of extra flavor going on with this design etched or decaled or whatever it is onto the lid, all the swirly patterns. I don't know, it's just something other than a plain finish. On that note, there was also the special Vivienne Tam edition in a very red peony flower-inspired design, apparently made to reflect the fashion designer's Spring 2009 collection and actually unveiled it at the Fashion Week show in Bryant Park, New York, where reportedly people mistook it for a purse rather than a PC.
But regardless, I unfortunately never saw one of those. I only ever saw these in black, and thankfully it is not that soft-touch rubbery plastic stuff either. So it's held up rather well other than the touchpad, which for some reason has started to discolor on these.
And yeah, it's one of those where you have the buttons for clicking on either side of the pad instead of top or bottom with a button for disabling the pad entirely just above that in case it's getting in the way of your typing. Which by the way is really not that bad for the size. Now they are chiclet-style keys, but they're pretty close to full size so I had no problem typing on this thing, and the key travel is decent enough with just enough springiness that it never felt awful.
[soft keyboard typing sounds] Then up above the keyboard, you get this nice looking speaker grill, a metal enclosure, really letting out all of that "high-fidelity" sound that it's capable of... Not really. It's okay. ["The Years We Had" plays chintzily] As for the I/O and other functionality, on the front you get the power switch, a bunch of LEDs for activity, a switch for toggling all wireless functionality on or off. And there is nothing around the back, it's just the bottom of the screen. And then on the left-hand side you get the power connector, a USB 2.0 port, a fan that's small but effective,
a connector for an HP proprietary VGA output dongle adapter, and the headphone and microphone combined jack, as well as ethernet, protected by its rubber cover. Then over on the opposite side you have this MMC/SD card slot, quite welcome in 2009, along with another USB 2.0 port, and this right here, which is nothing on this model, but on some you were able to install the HP Mini Mobile Drive, which I never saw one of these.
Apparently it was just a thin USB flash stick from Transcend or whoever and an HP bezel to fit the design of the Mini and add a little bit of extra storage. But instead of having it stick out the side, it was just sort of internal. As for the battery situation, by default you had this three-cell lithium ion battery that was capable of lasting up to five hours, but in my experience, it was more like three and a half. And they also offered a six-cell battery option, which added some height to the machine, but there it was.
And here's something that's interesting. If you look in the battery bay on this particular model, yeah, you'll see a mobile broadband module sticker and a spot for a SIM card. Yeah, this one was actually equipped with the option to get online through a mobile network, in this instance, Verizon. Now that's something I can't test anymore. I don't have a SIM card for it, but that's just pretty cool! I definitely didn't have this on mine back in the day.
What I definitely did have though is that webcam built into the top of the lid and it's accompanying microphone, both of which are the worst. [highly compress webcam audio] "Greetings and welcome to "an LGR from 2009 thing. It's pretty bad... "Yeah, this is what I remember it doing too. "After about 30 seconds, it just can't catch up "or keep up really with what's going on."
And on that note, what's going on with the general usage experience beyond the webcam? [Windows XP startup sound plays] So from the factory, it comes with Windows XP Home Edition SP3 and a bunch of bloat that was thrown on there by the manufacturer. Which is unwelcome in all cases, but it's even worse in a netbook when you need every ounce of performance you can get. As evidenced by the web browsing experience. Normally, I wouldn't recommend going online with an XP machine, but this is a netbook. We gotta get on the net and book around! And well, you know what? Browsing was cumbersome on this thing for me even when it was new. Doubling the RAM to two gigs
and having an SSD helped for sure, but even then, I still remember it struggling with resource-intensive sites. Anything with video or multimedia, Flash at the time. And it's obviously only gotten worse with the modern web as you're seeing here. Even with Windows XP-optimized browsers like Mypal68, well they try mighty hard, but that page file is getting a serious workout. Even with basic browsing and not any multimedia-intensive stuff and ad blockers to eliminate that aspect, it's just not up to the task on the modern web. And forget doing anything like YouTube.
Holy balls, it ain't great! [video plays somewhat poorly] "Greetings, welcome to an LGR thing that "I did not plan a recording today, but a..." And this is the more optimized Firefox-based browser. Oh, you go over to something Chromium based, ugh, you know it's not gonna be any better.
In fact, it's much worse. No surprise really. But using Supermium here, which I enjoy using on a higher-end XP system, it's so much worse on this poor Mini 1000 netbook. [video "plays" Very choppily] "Greeting-- "Welcome-to--an-LGR-thing.--"
Alright, so it's a netbook that sucks at nets. That's unfortunate. Sure, it was better back in the day, but, eh, it was never really that great at it to begin with. What about games then? After all, it has a little HP Games shortcut right there on the desktop, which takes you to a browser and a non-existent old website. And oh boy, internet Explorer 8 with a bunch of crap added onto it. Mm. Well, while I get some actual games to try on here, let's run the venerable 3DMark06 benchmark. And,
[chuckles at 1FPS] results are already amazing. Just, I was watching in awe as it slowly makes it through frame by frame. Alright, so we're gonna get to the results here cuz this is painful.
So in 3DMark06 on your typical full-size laptop from 2009 you could expect benchmark results with numbers between 2,000 and 3,000 on the high end and 600-ish all the way at the lowest end. Here are several examples from '09. Now the HP Mini 1000's results? 91! [laughs] At full resolution at least. Uh, yeah. So I decided to run it again at 640x480 and we've achieved a new grand total of 94.
[claps facetiously] - "Bravo. Genuinely impressive." - Just as a point of comparison, even the Sassy's Green PC I covered achieved a score of 1400 running at 1024x768 and that was an Intel Atom-based nettop. Albeit it had NVIDIA Ion graphics and a dual core D525, but that was only a year later in 2010. So this is not a gaming system. I know that, you know that, HP never sold it as that.
But alas, I still can't help but wanna try things and no, we will not run "Crysis." It's not for lack of trying, it just can't! Tossing up an error saying that your graphics chip might actually be a Dorito and so it'll try to load and then it just crashes. Well, what about "Doom 3" then? That was half a decade before this. And yeah, it technically runs. It isn't happy about it, but it'll do it. Granted, it resembles a slideshow from hell, which is thematically appropriate considering the subject matter of the game, but at the same time is not something you'd want to play.
Really, I found the best results come with games from 1997 to 2002 or so, especially anything before DirectX 9 was being used. So like the timeless Chris Sawyer classic "RollerCoaster Tycoon 2." It runs beautifully and it still looks amazing and it's exactly the type of game that I would've loved to play on this netbook back in the day. And today! It's still an awesome game of course, and it's fully playable on here. And since we're poking that simulation vein, I also wanted to try "SimCity 4 Deluxe" since it's graphically much more demanding and it's actually not the most unplayable thing, especially on lower graphic settings, but if you crank it all the way up, it's still not that bad. I'd consider this playable.
However, it does run into a weird issue. Something you immediately notice as it's starting up with everything just being off center. Then once you get into the actual gameplay, it seems okay until you start opening some of the menus. Like being able to lay down residential zones? Well, you can't do that because it's off the screen somewhere over the top.
And, no, changing resolutions higher or lower did not help. Apparently some have fixed this by setting custom resolutions and I just hadn't bothered. Another one I ran into a weird issue with was "Tomb Raider: Chronicles" from 2000.
And while it looks and runs beautifully, it did this at one point, which... that's just odd. But otherwise, yeah, it was fully playable and I had no problems the rest of the time testing. Then I also decided to give DOSBox a try because a little old school PC emulation is exactly the kind of thing I did on this back in the day, and everything was working great in "Doom 2" here until it wasn't. And, uh yeah! I realized what happened when I was playing "Tomb Raider" and the same thing happened here just with a different result. So when you press the Alt key and one of the arrow keys, it will rotate the screen.
And for some reason in Tomb Raider this just made everything glitch out and freeze. But in DOSBox, it just lets you rotate it around any which way you want. But yeah, I disabled this in the operating system and continued with "Duke 3D" of course, and it runs just okay.
Not 100% full speed, even at 320x200. But it's a Build Engine game, that's kind of to be expected on a lower-end system like this. And otherwise, yeah, fully playable I would say. I had no problems in DOSBox. And since I'm in a Duke Nukem mood, why not try "Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project"? A game I always forget how much I actually really enjoy until I revisit it every so often. And yeah, thankfully runs quite playable on here.
Again, not 100% full speed, but whatever. Perfectly fine, even with those tiny arrow keys. It does have really small cursor keys, but you get used to it. Like with the game "Re-Volt," an absolute classic that I adore. And it runs fantastically even at full native resolution of this widescreen display.
And yeah, it has a widescreen mode, at least in this version I have from GOG. And while it's not a solid 60 all of the time, it's still very playable. It's really only when you get to sections with really reflective floors and a bunch of effects going on that it slows down. Now something that is on the edge of being playable but is probably not, that's "Unreal Tournament 2004," which I really had better expectations going into testing it.
Typically it's very optimized and runs even on pieces of day-old toast, but somehow the Mini 1000 performs even slower than that. And while I would've considered this technically playable in like 2004 on a really awful laptop that we definitely had and played it with a frame rate much like this, I'm not forced to do that anymore, so I'm not going to. It's really bad, especially on more open-ended maps where you can see farther than like five feet ahead of you. But hey, at least it runs better than "The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion." It won't even start up, it just crashes every single time.
And then finally, I had to test a GTA and I went with the third, since I figured it had the best chance of running and running pretty decently on here. And yeah, it runs, and runs pretty decently! Granted, I had to crank down the draw distance to about half way, but other than that, fully playable even with the frame rate dropping into the teens. But really the best experiences that I've had on here are just chilling, messing around with some old applications and listening to music and whatever, like it's just good vibes with Windows XP running on a small little system, Winamp blasting the "POD" soundtrack and IMing friends online using AOL Instant Messenger 5.
[POD music plays] [door creaks] [AIM messages chiming] Yeah, this right here is about as close to time travel as it gets. And by the way, shout out to the NINA project, kind of an offshoot of that Escargot one where they brought back MSN Messenger. Well now they're doing it with AIM and AOL desktop and Yahoo Messenger and ICQ.
Ah, it's just an awesome project and it is a perfect use for a system like this. And well, that is about it for the HP Mini 1000 for this episode of LGR. And man, I still am quite fond of this little thing, even though it isn't great at very much at all, except being small and cute and running Windows XP. Which, when new definitely felt a bit outdated, just kind of a stopgap because the hardware wasn't really up to snuff for running something newer.
But nowadays it's just a delightful throwback. I was enamored having a full Windows OS on something this small back then, and I still am now. It's the same reason that I enjoy UMPCs and subnotebooks and things like the Toshiba Libretto and modern stuff from GPD, and the million companies now making Windows handhelds. In a way, the nettop and netbook idea never really died, but evolved into the many systems and laptops based on things like the Intel N100s and AMD Ryzen 5000Us of the world. But while those can be pretty great, going back to the original concept, revisiting the Mini 1000 very much reminds me why I got rid of it so quickly back then. Even with the SSD and after upgrading the RAM, this isn't very good at much of anything I wanted to do in 2009.
Especially in just a couple of years after that as web content and browsers and plugins and all these kind of things kept getting more and more complex, and frankly bloated. And soon the appeal of the smallness was overshadowed by the needs of everything else that I found myself wanting to do. My mistake was buying it as my one and only laptop and portable computer. Fully my bad. I mean, HP never advertised this as a computer that you would choose as your main. In fact, marketing said it was like your third computer after your normal laptop and your desktop.
And that would make sense if you were the kind of person that that made sense to and you had money and stuff and I did not. [pinball table buzzing] Hence me selling it quite quickly and remaining content with my BlackBerry Pearl as my mobile internet thing of choice, probably. But either way, I definitely left the netbook form factor behind and forgot about it until fairly recently when wanting to make this video.
And I'm glad I did, because now it's just a fun older little device to play around with and putting it through its paces for no other reason than because I can. And if nothing else, it makes it an interesting little thing to play some late '90s and very early 2000s games on. Not because it's the best at it, but because it's different than the norm.
[resigned chuckle] That's about it! Unless you're just really nostalgic for these things, I don't really see much reason to recommend going out and getting one. The netbook collector's market I don't really imagine will ever exist in any real capacity. And that is fine. Not every old machine needs to be valuable or collectible or whatever to be enjoyed for what it is. But yeah, that really is it for this episode of LGR.
Did you have an HP Mini 1000 or one of the many, many endless competitors that were out those few years? Lemme know your experience in the comments, whether or not you're still fond of these kind of things or you're really okay leaving them fully in the past. And I hope you stick around for new videos in the works here on LGR and as always, thanks for watching!
2025-02-16 21:50
