I felt a little daring tonight so I took apart most of the Mini-Note and took some pics along the way. Enjoy:
Mini-Note with the keyboard off
Keyboard and top shell off
CPU and North Bridge Heatsink
South Bridge
North Bridge
Empty!
Underside of motherboard
PCI Express Chipset I think
Backside of wireless card
Frontside of wireless card
And finally the money shot:
On the previous battery life test the Mini-Note running Vista Business got to two hours and twenty minutes before the 10% battery life warning came up. At that point it said the battery still had 19 minutes left, so there was about two hours and forty minutes of battery time there.
This time on the XP test the Mini-Note got 2 hours and 42 minutes before the 10% warning came up. The warning said the battery had about 19 minutes of charge on it. The gives us around 3 hours of battery life.
Both tests were done on the 1.6Ghz Mini-Note with the six-cell battery by playing a Superbad DVD rip at full screen of the HD, with the volume at a reasonable level, wireless on, power mode set to Max Performance/Minimal Power management (Vista/XP), and the screen brightness set two notches down from full brightness.
In the forums, Ruckusnuts shared his experience with various older games on the Mini-Note. He is very pleased to find that the 2133 met all his expectations and is probably playing Never Winter Nights while getting drunk as we speak 
Thanks for sharing Ruckusnuts!
jkOnTheRun has a video of a video call through Skype on XP. It looks good enough and doesn’t seem to drop any frames or audio. This is a huge improvement over Skype’s performance in Vista which is good news for those of you worried about the VIA C7-M processor. It still a little underpowered, but the processor a decent operating system and it will handle the basic stuff well enough.
Check it out: http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/05/jkontherun-geek.html
Continuing on with my reviews of the 1.6Ghz Mini-Note (KX870AT) this time I’ll be focusing on video play back.
Web Videos
I tried out various videos on Hulu, YouTube, Metacafe and Break to test the Mini-Notes Flash (FLV) movie playback. Videos from each site, except Hulu, played back watchable but did have some noticeable dropped frames. Nothing too terrible though. Hulu played back awful. The Mini-Note just couldn’t keep up with their videos.
AVI Videos
I was very impressed with the Mini-Note’s performance playing back AVI movies. I tried two different movies which played flawlessly in small or full screen modes. The only issue I ran into was when resizing the Windows Media Player window. The video would seem to get delayed and then rush to catch up. (it looked like it was fast forwarding, but the audio was fine). I was most impressed by the fact they still played perfect with the processor running at 800Mhz instead of 1600Mhz.
While they did play great with no other active apps, when surfing the web or using Word they did start dropping frames or the audio would get out of sync.
Details of the videos used:
Video 1
Filesize: 1.5GB
Frame Dimensions: 720×304
Data Rate: 227kbps
Total Bitrate: 449kbps
Framerate: 23fps
CPU Usage: 45-60%
Video 2
Filesize: 700MB
Frame Dimensions: 608×336
Data Rate: 103kbps
Total Bitrate: 112kbps
Framerate: 23fps
CPU Usage: 30-40%
QuickTime Videos
QuickTime’s high definition video trailers really left something to be desired. The 480p version was the only one close to being watchable, and only then after you waited for it to completely download. The 720p and 1080p versions dropped frames like crazy and were unwatchable (unless you like audio slideshows). Any of the videos in full screen also didn’t not playback acceptably either.
On the SD side of things, the Small and Medium sized trailers played great. The Large sized trailer played very well once it finished downloading the movie. While it was downloading there were some dropped frames and jerky motion.
DVD Playback
To test DVDs I borrowed an internal Lite-on DVD/CDRW drive from one of the desktops and connected it to the Mini-Note with an IDE to USB converter. For playing the DVD I used PowerDVD 8. DVD playback had a lot of dropped frames and audio that skipped in either small or fullscreen modes. Sadly it wasn’t enjoyable at all.
Summary
Overall I think the Mini-Note with Vista handles video playback fine considering it’s not really meant for that sort of thing. Hopefully when 2133 is refreshed with Isaiah or Atom in the coming months we’ll see a big improvement on video playback.
I didn’t install XP last night because I wanted to run some more benchmarks so we could have some hard numbers to compare to when I’ve installed XP. Today I ran two video encoding tests:
So we have something for comparison now, I ran my two desktops through the same tests. The Intel Desktop has a Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocked to run at 1867Mhz (from 1600) with 2GB of RAM, and 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB cache hard drive. The AMD Desktop has an Athlon 64 3000+ running at 1802Mhz, with 1GB of RAM, and a 7200RPM 80GB hard drive. Each has Windows Media Center Edition on it. The Mini-Note is running a VIA C7-m 1.6Ghz processor, along with 2GB of RAM, 120GB 7200 RPM HD, and Windows Vista Business. I also decided to put the 2133 into Power Saver mode so the CPU would be throttled to 800Mhz and run separate tests at that speed as well. (actually I accidentally left the Mini-Note in Power Saver mode from when I was testing video playback and ran the first FLV conversion with it like that…)
Here are the results of the tests, enjoy:
| Test Description | Mini-Note @ 800 Mhz | Mini-Note @ 1200 Mhz | Mini-Note @ 1600 Mhz | Intel Desktop @ 1867Mhz DC | AMD Desktop @ 1802Mhz |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MOV to AVI | 15:30.35 | 10:24.18 | 8:18.23 | 2:13.93 | 3:17.00 |
| MOV to FLV | 5:40.83 | 4:25.34 | 2:56.83 | 47.68 | 1:12.15 |
I’ll have some more videos (once I can get a better camera) and some more reviews soon. If anyone wants to try this with their eeePC, or other netbook, and share their results let me know. I’ll send you a link where you can download the MOV file I used and other info for running the tests.
*UPDATED* Added times for 1200Mhz
Brad over at liliputing.com has some great videos up of his new MIni-note:
Unboxing the HP 2133 Mini-note
How the Mini-Note stacks up against the eeePC (literally)
First look at OpenSuSE on the HP Mini-note
While you’re over there check out his comprehensive list of netbooks he compiled. Thanks for sharing Brad!
Looks like running XP on your Mini-note is pretty awesome on the Mini-note. I’m sure HP had their hands tied by MS and had to offer Vista at first…
From the HP “Invent” BIOS screen to usable WinXP desktop: 35.72 seconds
From the “Windows XP” loading screen to usable WinXP desktop: 25.56 secondsNot too shabby! I have not really tweaked XP either - this is a standard install with my normal trimmings (Gmail Notifier, Nod32, S3 Video Tray, etc). It’s not bloated, but I made no efforts to trim it down. This is the 5200 rpm HDD as well - those of you with the 7200 rpm should notice faster boot times.
Movies play fine in XP, guys! I’m not sure about HD, but all of my normal 600 - 900 MB movie files play GREAT! They do skip a little when playing over the WLAN, but that probably has to do with my crappy wifi network. Running local from the HDD they’re perfect. CPU load is around 30 - 35% when playing a movie. “Contact” is playing in the background right now as I type this.
I have mine working with everything installed now too. This thing is incredibly snappy. I was actually going to return it because SuSe worked like crap. I had a lot of stuttering issues when I was typing and things were buggy and crashed a lot. I have absolutely no issues now in XP. The Wifi light even works now (sad that it doesn’t even work with the default OS).
Even the screen seems so much better. The default SuSe theme had really big icons and weird text and Windows doesn’t have any of these problems.
I get 2 hours of battery life in both linux and XP. It’s actually quite fast in XP…I’m surprised. I’ve installed Office Ultimate 2007 and it loads that up quicker than my Tablet PC that’s running a Core 2 Duo processor! Right now I’m running Rhapsody, Word 2007, Pidgin, Yahoo Widgets, Internet Explorer, and Google Talk on it at the same time and it seems fine. It’s still with the base 1 gig ram and 120 gig 5400 HDD, so you guys shouldn’t worry–this machine has enough power. Coming out of sleep is fast too, and boot-up is about 40-45 seconds. The only thing I’ve noticed is that the fan stays on most of the time. Very rarely does it become silent. Not a huge deal but something to be aware of.
I’m seriously thinking of selling my slooowww HP 2710p tablet and keeping this as my main laptop…hmmmm
This is great news and alleviates pretty much all my worries about the device.
Want to install XP in your Mini-note? Check out our guide
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