HP 2140 Mini-Note - Atom N270 / Reviews

Product Description

Small wonder, big possibilities, the ideal companion PC for the highly mobile professional, this fully functional HP Mini comes with all the features to keep you ultra-productive while staying ultra-mobile.The HP Mini 2140 is designed to go where you go without weighing you down. Don't be fooled by its size; this small wonder keeps you ultra-productive.

I've had my new HP 2140 for about a week now and so far so good. Setup was like any new laptop. Fast and easy. I especially like the XP operating system over Vista. First thing I noticed was the solid construction of this Netbook. It doesn't feel cheap and made of plastic. The keyboard also had a well constructed feel that had just enough room without feeling cramped.

Now the software package was limited but did offer a 30 day trial version of the MS Office 2007. I had no issues connecting to my draft N wireless network and printer setup completed in less than a minute. I do recommend the larger 6 cell battery which is rated for about 8 hours. Depending on how you use it you may get less than 6 hours like me.

In conclusion I really like this unit. I did my research prior to purchasing. According to Cnet reviews, this was the unit to beat and I have to say they are right. The screen size is nice and the 160 gb is plenty of storage for me. My unit came with a free Netbook sleeve to carry it in and yes you can still use the sleeve with the 6 cell battery attached. I may add another gb of ram for a faster multi tasking experience. The web cam seemed to work well with Skype. Picture quality was ok. As mentioned by other users the mouse button location had a slight learning curve but wasn't bad.

Note: I have yet to test the vga out connection and its resolution as I heard someone mention was a negative. Will update later.


BE VERY CAREFUL IF YOU PLAN TO PRINT FROM THIS TO AN HP PRINTER....IT WON'T WORK WITH SOME HP PRINTERS YOU MAY OWN.

All in all, this is a great little device. Powerful, compact, well thought out. BUT--and this is a BIG but....could not get the HP Mini 2140 to print to an fairly new HP Photosmart C6180 printer. Even after spending literally days on the phone with HP's engineers in Bangalore, this is a nonstarter, and I ultimately returned the device. There's just no excuse for this, particularly since the printer accepts jobs on our home network from our Macbook Pros and from our Thinkpads, but NOT from this nice, new handy, dandy HP Mini.

BE VERY CAREFUL.


Most current netbooks have a lot of similarities--with the same processor (Atom N270), similar size hard drives (most new with 160 GB) and similar LCD panel resolutions. The HP Mini-Note 2140 is no exception to most of these base tech specs except for the LCD panel resolution of 1024x576 (instead of 1024x600 like most others in the 10" range).

So why is this 2140 my current marginal favorite in comparison, after trying out friends' and those available in stores?

- Unlike most manufacturers, HP really got the keyboard right. The shift keys and enter key are large and where you expect them to be. Unlike other manufacturers, things are in place for productive touch typing and the 92%-size of standard laptop keyboard is pretty easy to adjust to.

- The exterior casing is made of solid-feeling aluminum instead of plastic. The netbook feels more durable and looks beautiful in comparison to most netbooks which can look a bit cheap in my opinion. The aluminum adds a few ounces to the weight, but mine is still under 3 pounds with the 6 cell battery.

- The netbook has a good selection of ports and connectors on the outside. It comes with an ExpressCard/54 slot which no other netbook currently does as far as I'm aware. Most of the other connectors are similar to other netbooks. It also has 2 USB ports, an analog (vga) monitor out jack (see below for my complaints about it), an SD card slot and separate mic and audio out jacks.

You would think I would be raving about this netbook, but there are some issues that are annoying and might even be deal-breakers for you.

A really bad engineering flaw is that VGA out port is useless for anything but driving an external projector at up to 1024x768. I wish I had known this before buying since it might have influenced my decision to purchase. I assume this issue may be correctable with a firmware/bios update, but I'm not holding my breath for HP to fix the problem. Usually once a manufacturer has released a product and have gotten your money, they tend to stop caring.

Most modern LCD panels have native resolutions higher than 1024x768 and the graphics begin suffering and looking pretty bad when you do not use the native resolution of the LCD monitor. The Intel chipset included is capable of doing higher resolution, but HP has managed to neuter the VGA out and make it less than useful.

At first I thought this was my monitor, but after testing it out on 3 different monitors, 3 different video drivers, and testing with moninfo, I see otherwise.

I tried 3 different drivers for the video adapter (one from HP and 2 different ones from Intel). You can get the Intel drivers to install by extracting the files, doing update driver in Windows XP, and then pointing it at the .inf file. None of the drivers fix the problem.

MonInfo is a utility which detects the characteristics of your monitors by directly querying them. When running it on my desktop, it correctly read the characteristics of both my monitors. On this netbook, it would only read the characteristics of the built-in display and any external monitor in use does not show up at all. Though this is a cheap video chipset, I can't imagine that this problem is common to all the manufacturers using it. Even when you make the external monitor the only one being used, moninfo will still not show anything but the internal LCD panel.

It's important for the computer to be able to query the monitor and obtain information so that it can make appropriate resolutions available. It's not going to happen on this netbook in its current state. Any external monitor shows up as "default monitor" with no higher resolutions than 1024x768. Even if you manage to change the advanced options in Windows display properties to show higher resolutions, they do not work properly. Any higher resolution than 1024x768 displays as a scrolling virtual desktop (in which the resolution is set at 1024x768 and any extra desktop is accessed by moving the mouse to the edge and scrolling the whole desktop). I also tried changing the "default monitor" driver but with no useful effect.

It seems that HP is intentionally or unintentionally limiting any external monitor to this low resolution. This situation may be acceptable for those who only use the VGA out for presentations on low-resolution projectors, but is unacceptable for other uses.

HP needs to have its feet held to the fire over the external monitor issues. The VGA out is a unique feature of this netbook in comparison to the lower-priced models. When a feature is present it should work correctly and as expected, and if not, the manufacturer should be held accountable. This is especially true when they try to make the feature a unique selling point as in this case.

A more minor quibble is that the built-in LCD panel resolution is only 1024x576 instead of 1024x600 like most other netbooks. Though it's only a 24-line difference, on this small of a screen every pixel counts more than on a larger monitor. At least the resolution is properly advertised so you know what you're getting.

The touchpad also has it's buttons on the side, which some people dislike but didn't bother me.

It's overall a good netbook. If HP would fix the external monitor issues, I'd probably think it was the best one currently available. As it stands, it's a good, but flawed.

About HP 2140 Mini-Note - Atom N270 / Reviews detail

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83 in Personal Computers
• Brand: Hewlett-Packard
• Model: 2140 Mini-Note
• Dimensions: 4.80 pounds
• Display size: 10.1

Features

• Product #: KS143UT
• Manufacturer: HP Business
• Manufacturer Item #: KS143UT#ABA
• UPC: 884420854586

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