HP Mini 5102 Review
November 11th, 2010Becky doesn’t drive. Since she was a teenager, and until we got married, she had lived in some form of student housing and always got by without owning a car. She’s now heavily involved with Playcentre and needs to go to a lot of classes and meetings. Sometimes she and the boys catch rides with a friend or her mum. Usually, I drive.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I needed a netbook to take advantage of several quiet hours per week to get some work done when I’m away from home. I’ve been wanting a netbook for a while, but I considered the build quality of that class of machine to be somewhat of a joke across the board. For many years, high quality ultraportables (the Dell Latitude E4200 being a current example) have been available, but I wasn’t prepared to spend anything near what those machines cost.
I recently learned about Hewlett Packard’s Mini 510x series of netbooks. Currently, the Mini 5102 machines are being cleared out and the 5103s are the new models.
The build quality is very high on these. No, really. If you think that all netbooks belong in the same aisle as the plastic pumpkins and whoopie cushions at WalMart, think again. The 5102 case and chassis are made out of aluminum and magnesium alloy.
The chicklet keyboard is great. It’s absolutely rigid. There is no flex at all. It’s 95% of full size and I have no trouble typing on it at essentially full speed.
For mobile broadband, if you buy a model with the Gobi mobile broadband interface, just pop your SIM card into the back of the machine and you’re good to go; no USB modem sticks out the side. The reception is great; equal too or better than the USB modems I use. HP’s mobile broadband software is slick and robust.
I came across a 5102 with the Atom N450, 2GB RAM, 7200rpm 320MB drive, Windows 7 Pro, and the hi-res (1366 x 768) display at what is—for NZ—a deep discount. Ascent.co.nz is selling them new for less than bozos on Trademe (our version of Ebay) are trying to get for their used ones. The current model equivalent in the 5103 costs double what I paid for my 5102. The meager performance boost was definitely not worth the extra money in my opinion.
The battery life (6-cell) is ridiculously good. Ten hours is possible.
It’s plenty fast for what I need it to do (web browser, email, word processing, listening to mp3s).
In summary: I’m very happy with this machine.
(Here’s a full review.)
Caveats?
There are two, in my opinion:
First, the machine ships with a profoundly broken piece of software called the HP Wireless Assistant. The version on the machine runs the CPU at 100%, which causes the fan to spin constantly at maximum RPM. I thought my 5102 had a hardware problem at first. Nope. It was the old/buggy HP Wireless Assistant. Installing the latest version (4.0.10.0, 21 Jul 2010 as of this writing) fixed the problem.
Why not just kill it/stop it from loading? You could, but this app controls all of your radios (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, mobile broadband) in a convenient way, so it’s nice to have. Shutting these interfaces off when not in use extends the battery life.
Using msconfig to stop a few other apps from loading during startup and using a basic desktop theme, I found, helps keep the fan quiet. Flash is pretty much guaranteed to get the fan to announce itself. Flashblock does the trick.
The other issue has to do with readability. The display is stunning, but 1366 x 768 packed into the 10.1 incher is definitely not easy on the eyes with default settings. Here are two quick tips to improve readability:
1) Bump the OS font size to 125% or 150%.
2) Use the fantastic NoSquint addon with Firefox. NoSquint allows you to force text on websites to display at whatever size you like, on both a global and a per site basis. On the HP Mini 5202, I set the global zoom to 125% and then I tweak it up or down as necessary. NoSquint remembers these settings. (I tried to pay Jason Tackaberry some money for his work on this addon, but he requests that any contributions should go to EFF instead. I was happy to do that.)
Ok, that’s it. After all of that you might expect me to try to sell you one of these machines by having an affiliate link up to Amazon. The reason I’m not doing that is because there are so many options that, chances are, I won’t link to the one you want. So, if you find the one you’re after on Amazon, as always, I’d appreciate it if you get there via Cryptogon, but you’ll want to check around to make sure that you get a good deal on one that’s configured with the options you want.
According to the review, it comes with “facial recognition.” Ah, gradualism at work. First comes the web-cam embedded into the laptop, then the “facial recognition.”
But see:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/facial_recognition_fail/
That 5102 you got sounds like the MS TechEd one from last year. I grabbed one of those for (I think) NZ$750 – been a great little machine.
I’ve had the lenovo s10 since april last year. It is solidly built (been all over the middle east). I use it for standard def video editing, recording aurio and HD video capture. Also the only netbook i could find that had an expressCard slot so I could have firewire…
Highly recommended.
$475 on trademe at the mo …