H-P 2133 Mini Mini-review

Greetings - like others on NBR I have been watching the netbook news unfold over the past months. I wanted to get my oldest daughter something more portable for college - so I bought an H-P 2133 yesterday. I paid $599 for the 1.2-Ghz version w/ Vista Home Basic.

First of all, I am very impressed with the build quality of the 2133. It is surprisingly small but very solid with no quality problems that I could detect. The battery snaps in tightly, the gaps and seams are even, and it has, as reported here on NBR, a real look of quality. The display really is gorgeous, bright and clear with great colors - and the two speakers have very good sound for such a small system.

But, then I was very disappointed because there was a stuck pixel in the lower left of the screen and the Vista Basic intialization took nearly 45 minutes!! The stuck pixel disappeared after the many reboots required by Vista. I played with Vista for a few minutes - and I can confirm that the 2133 really is a dog with Vista. Boot times were very slow and it seemed as if the whole system was stuck in molasses.

I installed XP Pro including blowing away the restore and Vista partitions. The install was easy - just hook up an external CD/DVD drive and the BIOS recognizes it. The H-P site has all (!!) of the XP drivers - the only slight wrinkle is needing to install .Net 2.0 before installing the Quick Launch buttons.

I am very impressed with the system after installing XP - so much that I am buying another one for myself!! It is very "snappy" now - it boots in under 35 seconds, and everything (VLC, Skype and Office 2003 so far) starts quickly. I have not seen any of the slow Internet Explorer page-build reported by others. Of course, I have not tried any 3D games, but that isn't why the system was purchased. That said, I cannot find any graphics-related slow-downs or glitches in everyday use for the past two days.

There are some downsides - but I knew about all three up-front. First, the system does become very hot when its run for several hours on the charger. It becomes warm when operating on battery but not too hot to touch. The battery life appears to be right at two hours - not the 2:15 to 2:30 that I thought I might get. And, third, although the display really is beautiful - the small font size/etc may be a show-stopper for senior cit's such as myself.

Overall - I do not regret buying it and I'm hoping to drive to Grafenwohr this coming week and pick up one for myself. Based on what I have seen so far, I highly recommend this system.

 

can u post some pictures?

 

Yeah I wanna see some pictures as well. Make sure the pictures are clear and not blurry.