The free netbook I received from TechEd Australia 2009, an HP Mini 2140, decided to die on me a couple of weeks ago. I’ve always had trouble with HP hardware, and even more with their support, so it wouldn’t have been my choice of netbook if I was to buy it myself, but it was free so I was more than happy to take it home.
Well, I realised that I had become quite used to carrying a netbook around for being on-call, so I decided to find a replacement. A new motherboard for the 2140 was around $200 on eBay, which is compatively cheap to what I ended up with, but I think it was worth it.
So I ended up buying a Gigabyte T1000P “netvertible” (the unofficial term for a netbook/tablet hybrid), which so far is a pretty decent little machine.
What’s in the box?
- Quick start guide
- User’s manual
- Utility and driver disc
- Warranty card and information
- Spare stylus
- 6-cell battery
- Power supply
- Cleaning cloth
- Magnetic closing case
- The T1000P
What’s good?
- The touch screen is very responsive for a resistive touch screen panel (the best I’ve used)
- The screen isn’t super-glossy, which means it might not look as asthetically pleasing, it doesn’t show fingerprints as much (but it’s not immune)
- The eSATAp (eSATA/USB) port for attaching external SATA hard drives
- The Intel Atom N470 1.83GHz 64-bit processor
- 1Gbps network card (standard in notebooks these days, but netbooks are still catching up)
- The 10.1″ multi-touch WXGA HD LED backlit screen with a display resolution of 1366 x 768
- Upgradable components are easily accessible via panels on the underside of the system
What’s not so good?
- There’s no accelerometer for auto-screen rotation, so you need to use the Gigabyte SmartManager software to manually alter the screen rotation
- The screen could be nicer, especially if they made it flush with the bezel rather than recessed
- There are no PXE boot options in the BIOS, so boot from external optical drive or USB are your other only main options
- The System UUID, which is meant to be a unique value normally based off the MAC address, looks like it’s still a generic testing UUID
- There’s no Windows Security Button, which means you need to flip out of tablet mode to use the keyboard to press CTRL + ALT + DEL to log in to a domain
- Mouse buttons require a hard press
- No option for a 7200RPM drive
- Stylus feels a bit un-natural to remove from the recess – A magnetic release would be nice
Photos (taken with a low-res camera, sorry)
http://img21.imageshack.us/g/imag0515u.jpg/
Overall, I think this machine deserves about a 3.5/5