HP 2133 Mini-Note

Windows 7 Pre-Beta on the Mini-Note

So far this week we’ve seen an eeePC 1000h and an MSI Wind running Windows 7 Ultimate pre-beta with good results, so lets see how a Mini-Note Handles it.

It took about 25 minutes to install everything and get to the desktop and I think it took about that long for the initial Vista setup way back when. As far as drivers go, only three things were fully missing from the Device Manager - the ethernet controller, and two unknown devices. Windows Update got things straightened out and I was on my way…

Boot up time was about a minute and twenty-two seconds. It might be ever-so-slightly faster because I still have a boot loader on there for Vista. Overall it’s a bit faster than Vista (1:38), but slower than XP (55 seconds). After all this is where the trouble began…

The Windows Experience Index test kept erroring out and wouldn’t complete, and 3DMark06 also had major errors  and wouldn’t complete it’s test. Closing the lid or using the Start Menu Sleep button would only shut off the screen and brought me back to the user login, but wouldn’t actually power the unit down at all. Most likely the drivers are causing some issues so I hit up HP’s site and installed all the Vista drivers over…and still had the issues. It seems the video drivers are the culprit because the WEI would complete successfully until the video drivers were installed:

For the record the error was: “an unknown error has caused WinSAT to fail in an unexpected way.” Oh so helpful Anyways, if we use the Vista score to guesstimate Windows 7’s scores, they should be pretty much the same.

Here’s the preliminary benchmarks, but take them worth a grain of salt because of the misc driver issues: (As mentioned, 3DMark06 and PCMark05 wouldn’t complete. Also Windows Defender is disabled on all Vista/W7 tests)

As far video playback goes, YouTube looks great regular or full screen mode in either normal or high quality playback. Hulu is also pretty good in regular screen and standard definition, but if you increase the size or resolution it starts dropping frames pretty bad. The Super Bad DVD rip I used for previous tests, did drop a lot of frames in full screen which is in kind of weird considering how well it handled the rest of the videos and comparable benchmarks to Vista. (Note: The K-Lite codecs were installed also)

Overall it does seem a bit faster than Vista and things are looking really good for this pre-beta. As Brad Linder said, if it’s already running this good on Ultimate, there’s not a need for a specific netbook build. However, I bet they will offer a cheap, stripped down version to replace XP that will have similar hardware limitations for the discount.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 7:27 pm and is filed under performance tests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.