Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Hi everyone, I received the blue Steam 11 directly from HP today. I have only spent a few hours with it but I thought I would post a quick review. It seems like a lot of computer for the money, it has a very solid feel. The only complaint I have is my touchpad has a slight rattle, when you tap it lightly you can hear and feel a rattle. It is hard to explain but it does not have the same tight, spring-loaded feel of other laptop touchpads I have used. I usually use an external mouse so it should not be an issue. I did not test performance other than playing some YouTube videos at 720p and the performance seemed good. I plugged in a 23 inch LCD TV to the HDMI port and that looked very good and the audio played through the TV speakers automatically and sounded good. I checked the disk with the Windows Disk Management Utility and it shows it has a 29 GB Hynix HBG4e with a 260 MB EFI partition, 21.54 GB NTFS C: drive (4.3 GB used, 17.2 GB free) and a 7.20 GB Recovery partition. Changing the BIOS to legacy boot mode, I attempted to boot Mint Linux 17 from a USB stick (and also an external DVD drive) and it booted very slowly, I never got it fully booted. It kept displaying "Buffer I/O error on device mmcblk0rpmb" errors which I googled and found is a known issue with the latter Linux kernels and newer eMMC flash devices. There is apparently a kernel patch for it. I also got these same errors attempting Mint 16 but when I dropped back to Mint 15 with the 3.8.0-19-generic kernel, it booted fine. Unfortunately the Realtek RTL8723BE Wifi card was not recognized and the touchpad did not work. I will continue to work on these issues and report back my progress. UPDATE 11/2/14: After some experimentation, the best Linux distro I have found so far for the Stream 11 seems to be the newly released Ubuntu 14.10 with its 3.16 kernel which recognizes the Stream's Wifi and touchpad. It does still have the problem with the slow boot up (about 8 minutes compared to over 2 hours for Mint 17) where it displays "Buffer I/O error on device mmcblk0rpmb" and "stdin: I/O error" errors. After boot up, other operations trying to read the disk are also slow. The problem appears to be the Hynix HBG4e drive's 4 MB Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) partition which mounts as /dev/mmcblk0rpmb. It uses different commands and the Linux kernel is unable to access it. There are some kernel patches available that prevent the kernel from attempting access but I have not tried that yet. The partition is apparently used to store DRM and/or OEM licensing keys. UPDATE 11/5/14: I installed Ubuntu Mate 14.10 64-bit to the hard drive as a dual boot with Windows 8.1 and it seems to be working well. It has solved (or at least greatly reduced) the problem with the RPMB partition delaying booting and disk operations. I wrote up the procedure I used: Dual Boot Ubuntu 14.10/Windows 8.1 Install Procedure for the HP Stream 11 laptop: - Download the Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit ISO image and burn it to a USB drive, (the 32-bit images cause issues with UEFI and the grub boot loader). I used Ubuntu Mate but other flavors such as Kubuntu and Xubuntu should work fine also. - In Windows, use the Disk Management utility to shrink the C: drive to make room for Ubuntu, I shrank mine by 10 GB. - In the BIOS, leave the legacy support boot option set to the default "Disabled". - Turn the computer on and when you see the backlight, press the F9 key to display boot options and select the USB drive. Select "Install Ubuntu", there is a 2-3 minute delay due to the RPMB partition issue, (press ESC if you want to see the errors). - When the Install screen appears, select language and add a Wifi connection if you have it. I selected both options presented here: "Download Updates while Installing" and "Install this third-party software". - There was a 8 minute delay here while it read the disk configuration due to the RPMB partition issue. - For Installation Type, pick "Something else". It should now show the free disk space you created in Windows, I created a 8 GB ext4 partition mounted on root "/" and a 2 GB swap area partition. - Highlight the ext4 partition and click "Install Now", it will confirm that it will write changes to the disk configuration. - If you want to only run Ubuntu and not Windows, you can wipe the entire eMMC drive clean (including the 7 GB recovery partition) by selecting the default "Erase Disk and Install Ubuntu" option. It will do the partitioning for you if you want by creating a 512 MB EFIboot, 26.73 GB ext4, and a 1.89 GB swap partition. (You might want to first create recovery media in Windows using the Recovery Manager utility and a 8 GB USB drive so you can restore back to the factory configuration if needed.) - While the installation runs, it will prompt for time zone, keyboard, user credentials and computer name. - When it finishes, reboot and you should see the GRUB Boot Menu allowing you to boot into either Ubuntu or Windows (if you left Windows in place on the drive). When Ubuntu runs for the first time, the touchpad clicks may be disabled depending on the Ubuntu flavor installed so you need an external mouse to navigate to System => Control Center => Mouse and select "Enable Mouse Clicks With Touchpad". There may be a way to do this from the keyboard also. There may also be an issue with the touchpad and mouse freezing so you need to run the Software Updater to get the latest updates and then reboot and it should hopefully fix this. (It was fixed on Ubunbu Mate but not on Ubuntu Gnome when I tried it.) The RPMB partition issue also seems fixed at this point, I installed GParted and it came up quickly without any delay. Hope this helps.