Well, I'm testing out the keyboard on this funky little Mini once again before I go back to school tomorrow. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. So far, I think I only have a few cons to the purchase. Tomorrow will show forth exactly what good can come of it!

Con #1: The Shift key. Seriously, this is a pain in the tail. The one I use is about the size of a standard arrow key, and the Up arrow is right beside it, and I wind up hitting up instead of shift a lot of the time. It's going to force me to forgo the proper capitalization of things when I make notes... At least until I get used to it. I'm already hitting it a lot more than I was lastnight!

Con #2: The Apostrophe key. Usually right beside Enter, right? Well, on the Mini, they apparently wanted to keep the Enter key the same size, so they had to move apostrophe down next to the left arrow key. It's incredibly weird, to say the least. I mean, the shift key is in the same place, just smaller, but the apostrophe is somewhere entirely different. Far different than any standard keyboard, period.

Con #3: Linux. Yeah, I bet I'll make someone angry with that, but I don't really care. I realize that Windows is a demanding operating system, so I really didn't want to have it on this little thing. It's 1.6GHz in an architecture I really don't understand yet, so I don't get the speed, yet. After spring semester, I'll play with putting XP on it maybe, but until then, I'm stuck with Ubuntu... Which really isn't a bad thing, but I need wireless, and I don't know how to do that in Linux, so I'm going to get a crash course. Plus, I use XFire IMs sometimes and Linux clearly doesn't support that. I mean... Games on Linux? There's no point to XFire on Linux! Still, it comes with Pidgin and OpenOffice out of the box, which is all I need, really. It comes with Firefox, too, which is unfortunate. I think if I had to choose, I'd rather use Internet Explorer on this thing rather than Firefox or Chrome. They're not exactly low-power friendly. Plus, Ubuntu isn't remembering the brightness levels of my LCD from boot or returning from suspend, and I can't find anything online about them, either. Oh well... I can handle turning down the brightness every time.

Other than those, which are really more of a matter of taste than anything. Except maybe the keyboard problems. In fact, the F11 and F12 keys are missing entirely from the keyboard... Or are they? There was a BIOS revision (A03, I believe) that mapped F11 and F12 to the Fn+Z and Fn+X keys, respectively. With the small monitor, it sure is handy to load up a browser in full screen mode. I really wouldn't consider the 1024x600 resolution a con. It's small, sure, but it hasn't been much of a hinderance. It's a bit bothersome until you make the task bars retract when they're not in use and until you grasp how to make browsers and word processors run in full screen mode. (By which I mean "run without toolbars" mode.)

So! I think I wrote this in a timely fashion... Considering the weird keyboard. I AM getting used to it, which is nice. I hope to make good use of this dude in the coming semesters! (Heck, it can even watch movies over the network... I watched some Early Edition on it lastnight and it was surprisingly crisp and smooth! Put some videos on a USB drive and I can have instant entertainment between classes... Which I should probably use for studying... But we'll see!)