Wednesday 15 March 2017

Instant on

Following on from my last about the instant on of Chromebooks compared to almost anything else, I was playing with J's HP Beats Audio laptop (purchased late 2012 at the start of the Windows 8 debacle when it was the only Win7 device left in the store) trying to get an old Wacom tablet to work.

The laptop is still on Windows 7 so I thought we might be in with a chance - we weren't. But when I gave up and shut it down I noticed a second power on button next to the 'proper' power button.

So I pressed it.

And it booted up into a customised copy of firefox running in a little linux kiosk environment. I'm guessing there's some jiggery pokery on the circuit board that boots from the main disk if the big power button is pressed, or from linux, either from a separate partition or a little  bit of SD ram if the second button is pressed.

The nice thing about it is that it is instant on - not quite as fast as a Chromebook, but not far off it, and with a recent browser, good enough for gmail, outlook, evernote, zoho docs or almost anything else you can think of.

And it's instant off as well, making it idea for checking mail, writing a quick note or whatever.

Nice one HP !

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