I arrived in Richmond, VA this morning earlier than expected. I was meeting a few people and things were pushed back, so I had the chance to go by Best Buy and find a USB->VGA adapter. Apparently they don’t have the HP VGA cable, so I got this adapter instead.

I opened the box to find the device, and a CD. That’s interesting because the netbook doesn’t have a CD drive. I’d debated about grabbing an external DVD drive when I was in the store, but my bag is heavy enough. With my laptop, power adapter, extra USB disk drive, and now the netbook it feels like I’m carrying quite a load.

So how to get this working? Luckily I had an idea. I hit the local Starbucks and then connected to the web, downloading drivers from Tritton Technologies. One annoying thing was once I’d gotten to the site, they list a number of models, all of which look alike. I had the device with me, but not the box, and there as no model number printed on the device. A serial number, but that didn’t help. Grrrrr.

I had to go back to the car, look at the box, and then download the driver. I suspected that there was one driver for all models, but I hate trying to uninstall drivers. I’m still a little gunshy after all these years working with Windows.

Once that was done, I wrote a couple blogs, including this blog on the device. Some impressions:

• It’s small. Carrying it one handed is nice and easy. It’s much, much smaller than the laptop, and weighs only slightly more than the Kindle. That is nice.
• It doesn’t work great in the car. I had the box with me and tried to prop it on my lap to download drivers, but it was too small. Had to come back inside to a slightly bigger space to easily use it.
• One the flip side, you can pretty easily hold it up with one hand and use the other to work the mouse.
• I use page up/down, home, and end keys extensively. These require the Function key to work (they are on the arrow keys), so that takes a little getting used to.
• The keyboard works well for me. I type pretty quickly, and it works well for me.
• The CPU is slow. There are times you click something and it seems to take a minute to switch over. Something to be aware of as you install things.
• I have Firefox, Twirl, LiveWriter running, seems to work OK, other than some slowness to switch apps.

I’ll have more impressions over the next few weeks as I use this and compare it with my laptop.