With screen brightness at 50 percent, we saw 3 hours and 58 minutes of endurance, which is about as good as it gets (so far) for this category. While surfing the Web with the LCD's brightness at maximum, streaming music from Slacker, and checking e-mail, the HP Mini-Note lasted a weak 1 hour and 23 minutes on a charge. It did take 54 seconds for the OS to boot, but that's a solid improvement over the 1 minute and 18 seconds needed for Vista load. It's still on the low side, but the Mini-Note had no trouble handling XP, running Meebo, and streaming Slacker Internet radio as we checked e-mail and worked in Google Docs. The VIA Chrome 9 graphics chip helped the Mini-Note achieve a 3DMark03 score of 477, which is slightly better than the 380 score seen on the Vista version. Still, we had no problems streaming Hulu and YouTube videos. The Mini-Note is powered by a 1.2-GHz VIA C7-M processor and 1GB of RAM and produced a PCMark05 score of 1,006, which isn't blazing but is more than 200 points better than the 2go PC's 780 score. These latter configurations start at $599. HP offers several drive choices as well, including a 4GB solid state drive for the Linux version (starting at $499), and 120GB and 160GB drives that spin at 5,400 rpm.
#HP MININOTE 2133 BATTERY PROFESSIONAL#
Our Mini-Note came with Windows XP Professional installed on a 5,400-rpm 120GB hard drive (which is protected by an accelerometer) you can configure the system with Vista Business, Vista Home Basic, FreeDOS, or the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system. The built-in stereo speakers were surprisingly loud, but as with the majority of notebooks in this class, they lacked sufficient low-end punch. The HP Mini-Note doesn't come with a webcam utility, but Meebo immediately recognized the camera, which provided adequate image quality for video chatting. Positioned above the display is a camera and microphone embedded in the upper bezel. (Sure, you can plug a USB modem into other mini-notebooks, but they protrude from the side of the system more, making them easier to accidentally dislodge or break.)
Plus, you can plug in an ExpressCard mobile broadband modem, so you don't have to rely on Wi-Fi hotspots, which makes the HP Mini-Note attractive to business customers. Unlike competing systems, such as the ASUS Eee PCand Everex CloudBook, you can configure the Mini-Note with your choice of processors, RAM, and hard drives. Along the perimeter of the machine is a power switch, drive indicator, Wi-Fi toggle, Ethernet, VGA, headphone and microphone jacks, two USB 2.0 ports, and ExpressCard/54 and SD Card slots.
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