So I picked up a new HP Mini 1000, I was planning on getting either an ASUS Eee or ACER. My primary Laptop is a ThinkPad and I really love it. This was mainly for using for Travel and Demos and to be hooked up to Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse. So it’s an in-expensive way to setup a small demo area for trade shows etc.

Not having considered actually purchasing one, I took the word of a Best Buy employee that this would be a good model for this. I picked up the solid state drive, less moving parts and traveling to shows this should hold up better, or so you’d imagine. I explained how it would be likely used without the built in monitor but using an external.

Guess what? This little sucker has a proprietary HP Mini VGA Cable. Silly bastards took a page right out of the Compaq or Apple marketing plan on how to make totally proprietary. After a little while Googleing, seems that I am not alone here in fact many people are pretty upset that this is proprietary and not even available for purchase! Guess I might be making my way back in to see if I can swap out for one of the other models like the ASUS Eee with a standard VGA port. I should have known better, I had purchased a Compaq notebook some years back and I remember now that everything seemed very proprietary on it and I swore I’d never buy one again… did the merge help Compaq or hurt HP?