HP Mini-Note plays right tune but misses beat with Vista: review

Stan Beer
Monday, 26 May 2008 17:11

Opinion and Analysis

Let's get down to the heart of the matter. Whatever you may think of Vista, it's a big bloated operating system that's designed to be used with a powerful computer with a powerful processor, if possible a dedicated GPU and definitely loads of memory. I run Vista on my desktop with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM and a 256MB GPU. My notebook also runs Vista with fair to middling performance using a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM and no GPU.

Now let's see what we have driving our little Mini-Note - a VIA C7-M ULV processor (1.0-1.6GHz) and 1GB RAM expandable to 2GB. Sorry, but that's just not good enough for Vista, whatever HP and Microsoft may want you to believe. In fact, these days in my view it's not even good enough for XP.

Given that one of the first things you're going to want to do with the Mini-Note is connect to the net, running any form of Windows requires a decent security package. Uh-oh, there goes a fair percentage of system resources and, with the Mini-Note, it's not as if you've got processing power and memory coming out your ears. Now add that fairly indispensable peer-to-peer road warrior's tool Skype to your system and watch it slow to a crawl.

But of course with the Mini-Note, you get a wonderful 25cm wide keyboard (Eee PC is 21cm, full size Dell Latitude is 28cm) and with its big keys it really is a joy to use - even for a touch typist. You also get a sparkling 1280 X 768 8.9 inch monitor - far better than the same sized 1024 x 600 display on the Eee PC 900.

However, with Vista all of that is wasted. The desktop icons are so tiny, so in order to see you'll have to upsize everything and worry if dialog boxes will scale properly with the enlarged fonts. It can be done however.

Of course the upside of having Vista and a 120-160GB hard drive is that you can take your desktop on the road. The question is should we really try to take our desktops on the road with this computer? When I see a little computer like the Mini-Note (or the Eee PC), I see a perfect cloud computing device.

It's great for taking on the road and connecting to the net, checking web mail, checking your web-based diary, staying in touch via Skype, maybe do a little word processing (online or on the desktop), even watch a movie stored on your hard drive.

However, if you want to take your office desktop on the road using Vista, don't buy an HP Mini-Note get yourself a real notebook and put up with the discomfort of lugging it around.

In closing, a word to HP: in the Mini-Note you've produced a wonderful little computer. Now go out and find an operating system worthy of it.