General: HP 2133

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeMay 22nd 2008
     

    Trusted Reviews has a review of the HP 2133, potential EeePC killer. Unfortunately, the overall conclusion is to probably give it a miss.

    The chassis and design look awesome, and the keyboard looks a lot more inviting than the EeePC, but the touch pad buttons are on the left and right hand side of the touch pad, which frankly would drive me crazy. It weighs a little bit more than the EeePC at around 1.25kg, but it's still light enough to compete with a hardback book. The screen resolutions is 1280x768, which I wasn't expecting and it comes with Suse Linux installed.

    They have been silly enough to install a 120GB hard drive, which not only uses more power but makes it more vulnerable to damage and heats up quicker than a soldering iron. A 16-32GB SSD would have been much better suited for this area of the market.

    Andy draws the comparison between the processors - a 1.2GHz Via versus a 900MHz Celeron. Why are people still referring to the EeePC as having a 900MHz chip, when it's clocked down to 600MHz? Sure, it's technically capable of running at 900MHz, but as it's not - it shouldn't be talked about as such. Surprisingly despite this apparent clock speed increase, it couldn't cope with full screen video. Although the point is valid, using it to compare the CPUs isn't quite fair as the screen is much lower resolution on the EeePC. When I plugged the EeePC into a 1360x768 HD TV, it couldn't run full screen video either.

    My bedroom machine is a 1.2GHz Via chip and I found I could only get decent results out of it when using VLC and when correctly configured. This is running at 1280x1024. So I imagine with a little tweaking the HP would be fine at video playback - something they should have considered doing before shipping it with Suse installed.

    Stick a 6-cell battery in it, whip out the hard drive and plug in an IDE interfaced CF card, and you'd probably be on to a winner :)

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      CommentAuthorcrazy pete
    • CommentTimeMay 22nd 2008
     
    Posted By: Spode

    it's still light enough to compete with a hardback book.

    Perhaps a group test is in order? ;)

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeMay 22nd 2008
     

    At least you can open a hardback book without voiding its warranty ;)

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      CommentAuthorcoyote
    • CommentTimeMay 23rd 2008
     

    I think I've lost another brain cell, I now only have three! What's an IDE interfaced CF card?

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeMay 23rd 2008
     

    A compact flash card that interfaces via IDE :D

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      CommentAuthorcoyote
    • CommentTimeMay 23rd 2008
     

    Thanks Spode, I assume (AS usual) this mod is to increase battery life? I don't think a memory stick would compete with a 120Gig HDD for capacity. Perhaps I've misunderstood something. :|

    It's still early days yet for these little machines, I can see a time when almost everyone has them, just like mobile phones. The more they sell the better and hopefully cheaper they will become. Not that they are that expensive now, considering what most of them can do.

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeMay 23rd 2008
     

    Why not? 8GB CF Card would be plenty. And it would use a lot less power than a hard drive.

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      CommentAuthorcoyote
    • CommentTimeMay 23rd 2008
     

    Of course, I forget that Eee machines don't need huge amounts of storage. I'll get there in the end. :D

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Copyright Andrew Miller (Spode), 2008