I find HPs exhilarating. While many are tough critters which will thrive if left alone, they were bred with Victorian-era culture in mind; and I enjoy challenging myself to successfully play the role of a dedicated Victorian horticulturist. I enjoy their first burst of bloom, a thrilling spectacle by any measure. The fat buds, the immense blossoms--have I pruned and fertilized just right, how much should I disbud, will they open properly, will the weather cooperate? I feel that I am truly in touch with our rose forebears when I undergo the rigors of attending to HPs, helping them achieve their special sort of perfection. But it's more than that. The HP gardener has a special relationship, a special feeling of community, of shared tribulations and challanges, with his HPs. The triumph of the HP specimen is more than the rose succeeding--it is the gardener succeeding, and in a more participatory way than with other roses. At present, I grow 'Duc de Bragance', 'Gloire de Chedane-Guinoisseau', 'Souvenir du Dr. Jamain', four specimens of 'Roger Lambelin' (a most challenging rose indeed!), 'Comtesse Cecile de Chabrillant', 'Amedee Philibert', foundling 'Benny Lopez', and another foundling which I obtained from HRG decades ago, and the label of which long ago bleached out so I don't even know the study name. When pruning time comes, I smile when I step up to an HP; "now to test my skill," I say to myself. Revel in HPs, show your stuff, say I!

I found this message from an HP employee on a forum where they were asking how to recover a HP mini it may be of help to you. "F11 does not function on the HP Mini as there is no recovery partition. The unit includes an Operating System DVD and an application/Driver disc. The HP Mini 1000 is unique to consumer HP models, as most other HP consumer notebooks do not include discs and do have F11 function. If these were not included in the box please contact support. For my purposes, I have an external optical drive but I also use Symantec ghost 11. This allows you to create a bootable Ghost thumbdrive. Ghost also allows you to back the image up to a thumbdrive or external USB hard drive. I have images of HP MI, XP, and Win7 and can easily switch back and forth with Ghost, without requiring an optical drive any longer. -Bryan_N Although I am an HP employee, I am speaking for myself and not for HP. Message Edited by Bryan_N on 02-08-2009 12:33 AM -Bryan I am an HP employee " so it appears that some of the HP minis did not have a recovery partition but did come with 2 discs to use for recovery. This is the link to that forum discussion HP Mini however it sounds like there are several versions of the HP mini so not knowing which you have this may not apply if you do not have this version. what is your version and OS?

I have the ACER aspire one netbook which I love. Most of them have the same specs, the Atom intel processor and a gig of memory and 160 gig hard drive. I see that Toshiba is much higher priced than some of the Acer and MSI netbooks I have been seeing. Really no reason not to save money there. Some will have the 3 cell battery some the 6 cell that is about the main difference. I have the 3 cell but I use it at home mostly so that is not a problem for me. the speakers are horrible on all of them but picking up a cheap pair of earbuds at biglots or somewhere takes care of that problem. I too prefer using a real mouse over the touch pads. I see they add a lot of stuff on that one, I would want to remove a lot of that right off especially that Norton, you do not want a huge resource hog on that little netbook, I have AVAST on mine and it works great. Here is the link to the MSI wind that is on sale MSI Wind U100-013US 10" Netbook there are great sales on now and many of the black friday sales have netbooks on them.

it truly is amazing how young they are learning to use this extremely valuable machine. I can only imagine where I would be if I had had the opportunity to have a computer at such a young age. How fortunate they are to have the world at their fingertips. Your grandson is a very lucky boy to have you around to get him his very own computer and he will love the apple, not as many infection worries there too, although more recently there have been some aimed at apple but not as many as for windows. I think that is one of the reasons so many of the small netbooks and the one pc per child versions have linux pre-installed on them, no infection worries and what a great head start to learn linux so young. Here I am in my gray hair days learning linux! It sure would have been easier when more of my brain cells were co-operating LOL but I figure I am better off exercising them than letting them laze around.