Bought a mini laptop

[Dave Darling]

I just picked up this mini laptop off of Amazon, it is 8-inches across and will fit in your pocket, love this, I am going to load it with dual-boot between Windows 11 and Kali Linux and I am going to use it for penetration testing. It is pretty powerful, 3.4 GHz CPU and 12 GB of RAM. It has a solid feel to it, weights about 1 pound. The display also swivels around so it will double as a tablet PC.

 

[Lost4words]

Nice.

I prefer a bigger screen these days as my eyes are not as good as they used to be...

 

[AlexB23]

I just picked up this mini laptop off of Amazon, it is 8-inches across and will fit in your pocket, love this, I am going to load it with dual-boot between Windows 11 and Kali Linux and I am going to use it for penetration testing. It is pretty powerful, 3.4 GHz CPU and 12 GB of RAM. It has a solid feel to it, weights about 1 pound. The display also swivels around so it will double as a tablet PC.
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It is unbranded. Hopefully your notebook laptop lasts long. If you got a more powerful laptop, first thing I recommend to install is a locally run AI, known as Mistral 7B, but I am afraid that your new laptop would not be able to run it. My 6 year old laptop struggles running it also.

A more realistic thing to install that does not use AI is Firefox, and the addon "uBlock Origin", which blocks ads on the internet.

 

[nhaas11]

How many Cores?

 

[Dave Darling]

How many Cores?

4 cores I think

 

[peaceful-forest]

Will you let us know if the dual boot installation was successful? I've always heard that doing dual boot with Windows 11 was very difficult to do.

 

[JesseRaymondBassett]

Yes please let us know about the dual boot thing. I am curious myself. Whenever I tried to dual boot Win 11 & another system all I got were headaches. Good luck!

 

[nhaas11]

I have gone away from dual boot. if you have a good pc install Proxmox, then install your OS's of choice on Proxmox. I have moved all of my work stuff onto Windows 10 VM recently. When work is done i close RDP, and dont worry about work.

Now the reason for no-dual boot. I ran ubuntu, SuSE, Windows 10 are various times as dual boot. With upgrades you can get rewrites of grub causing my dual boot to fail...maybe its me, maybe its not. I think all occasions I was able to recover. Dual Boot can be a hassle.....

 

[elytron]

Your new micro laptop looks slick Dave, am also interested in how well it will dual boot 11. Loading Kali on there might be fun. Be careful though and don't get into trouble.

 

[JesseRaymondBassett]

@nhaas11 ,
I tried proxmox but did not like it. I am glad you found a reliable solution! Enjoy your mini pc! I just bought a chromebook myself here.

 

[Dave Darling]

I have tried doing the dual-boot and it has not worked so far, I am still working on it. I burned Kali Linux onto a DVD and tried to install it on the mini laptop but it didn't work, I now have gotten a USB jump drive and used Etcher to load Kali onto the jump drive and I will try to install it using that. I may pick up some more cheap laptops and use them to practice ethical hacking, I will set up my own private network using a 16-port ethernet switch that I have and my mini laptop with Kali will be offense and the other 4 laptops will be defense, I will try to hack the other 4 laptops using Kali.

 

[Dave Darling]

I was just playing around with this and found that the battery life from a full-charge is only like 2 hours 30 mins, terrible! This kills the portability of the laptop, it is small enough to fit in your pocket but the battery life means you have to keep it plugged-in all the time. They have 7-inch mini laptops on Amazon, I will do some research and if the battery life on those is much better I may just pick up one of those.

I am also looking at getting a power bank for my mini laptop, that would boost the battery life considerably and would be portable, it would plug into my laptop via USB-C.

 

[Dave Darling]

I just picked up this power bank off of Amazon, I was playing around with my mini laptop the other day and it turns out I found that the battery life was only 2 hours and 30 minutes from a full charge, terrible! This kills the portability of the laptop, it is small enough to fit in your pocket but the battery life means you have to keep it plugged-in all the time. The power bank should help extend the battery life by alot and it is portable. It is slick, has a nice heavy feel to it, probably weights about 3 pounds.

 

[Dave Darling]

Just checked on the 7-inch mini laptop, the battery life on that is 3 hours from a full-charge, not much better. I may get an Asus Vivobook, they battery life on those is 18 hours, they are only $240 and very nice.

 

[elytron]

Is unfortunate that your mini laptop has such a small battery.

I like Asus as a brand but have never owned any of their laptops.

Long time ago for a while I had an Asus RT-N66U wireless. Was a wonderful router at the time. Loaded it with Tomato firmware and had a positive experience.

 

[Dave Darling]

Just tried plugging in my new power bank into my laptop, turns out it didn't work! It looks like the bank is only 22.5 watts and the laptop needs 100 watts to recharge. I found another bank that is 100 watts on amazon, I will pick up one of those, it is only $59, link is here if you want to have a look:

Amazon.com

 

[Dave Darling]

Pics of the 7-inch mini laptop are here, I may still pick up one of these at some point.