HP 2133 Mini-Note

Submitted by j.a.watson on January 30, 2009 - 3:34am

I bought an HP 2133 Mini-Note last week, mostly because there has recently been a dramatic price cut on them here in Switzerland (the offer that I got cut the price basically in half). Now, of course, there is a reason for that price cut; as netbooks go, this one is getting a bit old, and HP has brought out, or announced, newer models - most recently the very nice looking HP Mini 2140 Notebook. But I have found that buying one generation behind the "latest and greatest" often yields the best value for money, and this one looks like no exception to that.

The major specs of my 2133 are: VIA C-7 1.6GHz CPU, 2 GB memory, 120 GB 5400 RPM SATA drive, 8.9" display with VIA Chrome 9 graphic adapter, 1280x768 resolution, Broadcom Gigabit wired network and Broadcom 4311 B/G wireless network, ADI 1984 HD audio. It came preloaded with Windows Vista Business, and with "downgrade" CDs for Windows XP Professional. It is also available preloaded with SuSE Linux Enterprise 10.

My intention was to set it up to dual-boot Windows and Linux, but the question was what versions of each. As it was preloaded with Vista, I gave that a try first. Not a good idea. I'm no Vista rookie, I have been trying it, off and on, since the first week it was released, and I've never been satisfied enough with it to keep it on either of my other two laptops for long. But this experience was so much worse that it almost defies description. This poor little netbook was barely able to stagger to its feet when running Vista. To add insult to injury, it also came with the Microsoft Office 90-day "free trial" trap... I think you can imagine what trying to load and use that was like.

So, after one evening of struggling with Vista, I decided to "downgrade" to XP. I often wonder who came up with the term "downgrade" for the process of changing from something that doesn't work to something that does... but in the world of Microsoft, I'm sure that makes sense to some people. Anyway, I took this opportunity to repartition the disk in preparation for trying Linux on it as well. I set up a 16 GB partition for Windows, followed by another 16 GB for my first shot at Linux, and a 4 GB swap partition, all primaries. I left the rest of the disk unallocated, waiting to decide on final disk partitioning until I saw what worked and what didn't. I'm not shy or reluctant about repartitioning or reloading my laptops...

Windows XP Professional loaded very smoothly, and surprisingly quickly. After having seen how slow the 2133 was under Vista, I was starting to worry that I had made a bad decision buying it, but I don't think so now. Everything worked, it runs smoothly, performance is absolutely adequate, and that is all I need or want to say about Windows in this forum...

Finally, to the "meat" of this post - loading Linux on it. Oh, by the way, the 2133 doesn't have a CD/DVD drive (duh, it's a netbook), so I use a LiteOn external USB powered drive, and it works great. It has one of those pig-tail cables that lets you plug it into two USB ports on the computer to get more power, but the 2133 has only two USB ports and they are on opposite sides so the cable won't reach both of them. That seems not to be a problem, it works just fine from only one. Whew. That sure beats lugging around yet another power brick!

I have written about all of the various Linux distributions that I tried on the 2133 in my ZDNet UK Blog, so I won't go into detail about all of them here. The "Reader's Digest" version is, it was often not a pretty sight. Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora and their derivatives failed to boot the LiveCD properly, and I wasn't interested in tracking down why just yet. I had high hopes for openSuSE, since SuSE Enterprise is a factory option for the 2133, and although the LiveCD booted and installed ok, it didn't recognize the wireless adapter, and the screen was only 1024x768. Mildly disappointing.

Finally, I loaded MEPIS 8.0 RC2. The LiveCD booted and installed very smoothly. The screen looked a bit odd, until I realized that it had come up at 1280x800, and it was being buffered and shifted as I moved the mouse to the top and bottom of the screen. Nice. Even better, both the wired AND wireless network interfaces were recognized and configured, and worked great. In fact, everything seemed to be working - touchpad, USB, power management... I was very pleased. I did eventually discover that the sound is not working, unfortunately. Whenever I run a program which attempts to produce sound output, all I get is a never-ending clicking noise, and the only way I can stop it is to reboot. This is a significant problem, but I assume that I will find a solution, and I can avoid it for the time being. Incidentally, neither openSuSE nor Vector Linux (which I installed after MEPIS) have a problem with the sound.

So, I now have the HP 2133 set up to multi-boot XP, MEPIS, openSuSE 11.1 and Vector 8.0 RC4. I use it pretty much every day during my commute to and from work, on the train and in the bus. The difference in size and weight from my Lifebook S6510 is tremedous, it is so much smaller and lighter to carry, and easier to open and use. The next step will be to get a 3G (HSPA) cellular modem for it. I currently have one for the Lifebooks, but it is PCMCIA and the 2133 has an Express Card slot. I could also get a USB dongle, but with only two USB ports available, and with one of them already used for my Logitech VX Nano mouse I would prefer not to tie up the other one as well.

If anyone has suggestions that might save me some time on getting the sound working, or on reducing the screen resolution to 1280x768, I would be pleased to hear them. Otherwise I will update here in my blog as I work things out.

jw 30/1/2009

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