The Long Road to a Mini Notebook
I spent the last five months reading and watching every review I could find about netbooks trying to decide which one to buy. The one drawback of the Mini became the inspiration for a breakthrough — Wires are for old people.

The most helpful site I found was notebookreview.com’s review of the HP Mini 1000. They had the standard aesthetic-oriented video review, but they also had in-depth information about the Mini’s performance. And I also found several reviews about other netbooks I was considering buying.

What Makes Netbooks Unique
After reading and watching all the reviews I could, here are the categories that I used to compare the netbooks.

Most importantly, how well the netbook is supported by the Linux community.
Secondarily, keyboard size
Tertiary, kind of hard drive

The other categories are basically the same any computer purchase:
Processor speed
Aesthetics
RAM
Price
Etc.

After deciding which options were most important to me, I was left with two choices; the Aspire One and the HP Mini 1000 (I bought mine just before the 2410 came out).

Why I Almost Didn’t Buy The Mini
The only thing I didn’t like about the HP (and the one thing most reviews criticized HP for) was their proprietary video output. If you want to plug the Mini into a larger monitor, you have to buy a special $70 adapter. Now, I honestly didn’t expect that I would buy a second monitor just for the Mini, and I would probably never unplug my desktop monitor in order to plug in the Mini, so the video output was probably useless anyway, but the fact that HP tried to require me to buy the extra adapter irritated me.

Why I’m Smarter than HP
While debating which netbook to buy, I realized HP was trying to hold me down. Trying to hold me down with their accessories. Trying to hod me down by requiring me to buy more of their stuff, first it’s the video adapter, then the external DVD, but where does it end, the tote-bag? I say NO!

Two key points:
1) I had just spent the last several months setting up and tweaking my home network.
2) I was planning on putting Linux on the Mini.

Which means, rather than waisting my time and money messing with a hardware video adapter, I could just mount my Mini’s hard drive onto my desktop via SSHFS. Brilliant.

Take that HP and your ridiculous video output. I don’t need your extra hardware, I’ve got free software.