DISQUS

It's not a Kindle, but my wife and I just took two Sony Readers to a beach vacation in Belize. They both survived fine (though the idea of a ziplock bag is a good one for future travel). Taking enough books along for two for a week would have severely impacted our "travel light" style.

If you plan on picking one up in Germany, be aware that German keyboards are quite a bit different than US keyboard layouts. For starters Y and Z are swapped (QWERTZ instead of QWERTY), and then there are Umlaut character keys. Plus a lot of the non alpha/number symbols are on different keys. It's easy to get used to if it's your only computer, but if you regularly switch between different machines with different keyboards, you'll not have a lot of fun.

I've been wondering if that fire is the reason why HP isn't offering any additional/replacement batteries for the Mini.

I wonder how the Japanese will put up with the sluggish performance of the Mini when running Vista...

Brad, is there no way to preserve the system restore partition, i.e., just replace the larger VISTA partition with XP? While I don't think I'd ever voluntarily go back to VISTA, it might in a pinch be useful if you're on the road and the XP partition somehow becomes corrupted. Granted, I could also carry around my 1 GB USB drive to restore XP from scratch.

Anyway, I tried to leave the VISTA restore partition behind and XP installed okay, but then the machine wouldn't boot from the hard disk (always got some sort of "bad OS" error at startup). Booting from the flash drive worked, but mucking with the boot.ini didn't help.

Incidentally, when I then tried to do the XP install again with the same memory stick, the text mode option always failed with "INF file txtsetup.sif corrupt or missing, status 18" error. Bizarre. So now my machine is back to Vista factory image and I created a new XP image on my USB drive, this time with SP2 slipstreamed in. Wish me luck :)

Well, Dell isn't going through that configuration hassle for just six weeks. They have (AFAIK) indicated that they will continue to do the downgrade for their customers even beyond June 30.

So I wonder if HP will ship out the downgrade disks to early adopter Vista Business Mini users.

Nice summary, Brad. I got my top-of-the-line Mini last week and just started using it Friday (busy week). This is the first machine I used with Vista (after reading reports of how it impacts battery life, I never installed the free "upgrade" on my Thinkpad X60t). And I am honestly shocked that HP thought this was a usable configuration. So right now True Image is creating a backup, should I ever want to go back to Vista. And then it's time for an upgrade to XP Professional.

The three pronged plug bugs me, too. A lot of my international adaptors are only two-pronged; time to go shopping for three-pronged ones, I guess. It also was nice to be able to use the same cable for a variety of chargers (e.g., Sony ebook reader) and save some space in that crammed gadget bag.

The keyboard/touch pad isn't really ideal for using the Mini in bed. I guess I should have thought about that earlier :)

Not sure what kind of slip case solution the 3rd party manufacturers will come up with for the extended battery configuration. Hmm.

I love high-res screens and have a 1400*1050 screen on my Thinkpad, but with the Mini I had to increase the font size.

No restore disks. Not good. No software to create them. Really bad.

Dave, what makes you think that the TiVo guys don't take a cue from the DVD guys, who have apparently discovered that they can get away with sticking mandatory FBI warnings and movie previews (=ads) in front of the actual movie.

There clearly seems to be a progression to push more and more advertising on paying TiVo customers. And since I don't think the post-show commercials are going to work, just like the on-demand ads, it seems forseeable that a more and more desparate (for money) TiVo will escalate this further...

And how long will it take until we read that TiVo will start inserting ads *before* a recording plays? (without the ability to skip over, for good measure).

I mean, really, who's going to watch adds *after* the show? Most people presumably don't even watch the credits.