This weekend I joined the Netbook crowd with the purchase of a HP Mini-Note 2133. It was just under £200 from PC World. This particular Netbook has been largely ignored due to the comparatively poor processor and poor choice of OS namely SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition (SLED).

I don’t really care about the processor speed, what I care about is the superb screen. The 2133 is the only Netbook I’m aware of that can do 1280 x 768, which for me is the ideal resolution for such a small device, other Netbook’s with their pitiful 1024×576 resolution just don’t cut it.

Oh and being a HP Netbook the keyboard, speakers, track pad and smart aluminium chassis are all well made and of a high quality.

Now I hate SLED, it’s slow, has bad package management and poor usability, it had to go. This brings me to the second reason for purchasing this laptop, the 120gb hard disk, no tiny 8gb SSD for me! I’ve carved this up into three partitions; one for Windows 7 (which runs surprisingly well) , one for data and one for Ubuntu Linux.

I installed Windows 7 from an 8gb USB stick, it took less than an hour. To my amazement after running Windows update everything worked! The only thing that needed tweaking was the sound card which wouldn’t detect the headphones when they were plugged in. I installed the Vista sound card driver from HPs website which cured the problem.

Next comes the Ubuntu install which I’m sure won’t be anywhere near as straightforward. I’ve already read about numerous problems, although all of them seem to have solutions.

All in all I’m really pleased, although I’m already considering upgrading the memory from 1gb to 2gb, well it’s only another twenty quid.

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