HP 2133 mini note

Lets get one thing straight, right off the bat the HP 2133 is a thing of beauty.

With it’s brushed aluminium lid and alloy chassis HP really went to town on construction and it has paid off.  Despite making a great first impression the mini note is a bit of a mixed bag overall.

The sturdy construction does have a trade off. The HP 2133 is a little on the porky side at 1.27 kg. It is also a little wider than some of its 8.9 Inch screen competition which believe me is a good thing.  The width of the 2133 has allowed HP to include a very nice spill proof keyboard which is 92% full size and eminently useable.

The wonderful keyboard takes up so much space that the trackpad is ridiculously squashed which makes scrolling up and down more like playing mario at the olympics on my daughter’s nintendo DS!

Again as a result of the space taken up by the keyboard the mouse pad buttons are to the sides of the pad rather than below it. Something that I could never get totally used to.

The 8.9 inch screen is a little too reflective which might cause issues using outside but it does manage a resolution of 1280×768 which is a step up from most displays of this size.

Two versions of this aluminium beauty are available sporting either suse Linux with 1Gb RAM  or Windows Vista Business with 2Gb RAM (good luck with that, more in a minute!).

For no apparent reason the Linux model comes with a 3 cell battery giving around 90 minutes use and the Vista model comes with 6 cells which ought to be good for 2.5 to 3 hours.

Both models have plenty of storage with a 120Gb hard disk drive and connectivity options are pretty good with a  D-Sub VGA port, 2 USB ports, mic and headphone jacks,  Ethernet,  ExpressCard and SD card readers.

Wireless is taken care of with 802.11 b/g but sadly no 3G datacard.

So onto the biggest issue with the HP 2133.

Performance

There is no easy way to say this.  It is very very slow.  At a time when most netbooks are offering Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz processors the HP 2133 plods along with the Via C7-M running at 1.2 Ghz.

The Via chip just isn’t up to running Vista (90 seconds to boot……zzzzzzzzz) so if the HP 2133 is the one for you then we heartily recommend the Linux version or be prepared to replace Vista with good old Windows XP which should stand more of a chance.

Conclusion

Overall if you want a handsome, rugged and well priced netbook (The Linux version is sub £200) and aren’t too worried about the best performance then this could well be the machine for you.