IT: Review on HP Mini 5101 Part 2- Software and Summary

In part 1, we review on the hardware specs of the new HP mini 5101. In Part 2, we will talk more on the software package and its performance.

HP choose to package 5101 with either XP home or XP Pro downgrade from Vista business. Whether Windows 7 will be offered for this model, there is still no announcement from HP yet. But given the better performance of Windows 7 vs Vista Business, there is no business reason for HP not to offer Windows 7 when it is officially launched in Oct 22 2009.

As with all XP based netbooks, the 2GB ram did improve the response of this unit. It boot up fast and office 2003 sp3 runs smoothly. If no one say this is a netbook, we will think we are looking at a Core Duo machine of similar specs. Corel office comes bundled with the 5101; we choose to remove it and use office 2003 instead. Office 2007 is more resource intensive so I will not advise on it unless the user can live with the performance degradation.

On engineering software side, we install Solidworks E-drawings 2009 and Autovue 19.3 and surprisingly, it works better than the Dell latitude 2100. Again we do not know if the RAM did play a significant part but given that this is the only difference between the two models, we choose to believe RAM indeed play a role here. The small screen size is a let-down unfortunately. I do not think anyone in their right mind will install full fledged engineering software like Solidworks 2009, UG NX6 etc on a netbook so we did not test on them.

For security software, we tested AVAST home, AVG home and symantec. Only avast offer good performance-cost-security ratio vs the rest. AVG slow down the machine a lot; initially we thought the machine is infected. Symantec runs reasonably well but as a pay-to-use product, it does not find favor in our budget section.

For warranty, one can choose either 1 year or 3 years. As measure, we advise a 3 years warranty as a better form of insurance.

In Summary, the HP mini 5101 is moving in the correct direction for corporate netbook manufacturers to follow. As more and more processor power gets tapped in netbook, it will not be long before netbook be a common item among corporate users.