Quick review: HP Mini 311 netbook with ION Graphics

[TomXP411]

I just picked up an HP Mini netbook, and I'm impressed in some ways and let down in others:

First of all, for BTV Link:

I set up the netbook with no special drivers and a freshly installed copy of BTV Link.

I'm watching Smallville right now in 1080i on the netbook (the screen is actually 1360x768, so it's downscaling a little), and the video looks GREAT. The picture looks excellent, and there's no lag on the playback. No stuttering or glitching. I switched over to last week's Dollhouse to the same result: great image quality and no glitching. I was a bit surprised at the CPU use: it hits about 85-95% and stays there while the video is playing, but the system is doing a good job of handling it.

Live video at 1080i is the same: perfect video and audio playback at SD or HD resolution.

Now for the bad: Flash video just plain sucks. Watching Colbert Report, one of Hulu's featured videos, is pretty painful at full screen. Fortunately, installing the newest Flash player helped. It also helps to reduce the screen resolution to 1088x612. Incidentally, Hulu Desktop makes it even worse... I'd stick to the web version for now.

For other tasks, such as word processing and web browsing, this thing is SO much nicer than even the 10" netbooks. The big difference is the keyboard. The extra screen size translates in to a bit more width, enough to put in a nearly full size keyboard. This makes typing so much easier: I can actually WORK on this thing, rather than fight with it when I want to do more than type an e-mail.

It also doesn't come with a lot of crapware, like many other notebooks. I only had to remove a couple of things, none of them space or memory hogs. I did remove all the MS trialware and used the Ninite installer to install all of my standard Free and Open Source stuff.

Compared to my 10" Acer netbook, I'd say this one is a definite win, both for the video quality (when hardware acceleration is available) and the keyboard. I'm annoyed that Flash still doesn't have accelerated video playback, but that's coming, from what I hear.

[Jakesty]

I thought that the ION graphics was supposed to be so much better than the Atom? Sounds like you're experiencing the same thing I am with the ATOM. HD shows are fine, MPEG compressed though suffer badly. Flash is also bad, but I haven't tried the new release to see if it's even acceptable.
To declutter a computer, there's a simple piece of software called DECRAPIFIER. Works nicely to do the add/remove of much of the junk added to a computer. Works best on HP and Dell pcs.

[ZetaVu]

If you're watching HD PVR recordings, are you using the arcsoft decoder? Install TME and switch to that, assuming you have xp installed. If you have windows 7 then hardware acceleration doesn't work (not sure if this is btv only or same issue with TME and Sagetv etc).

[RenegadeELEN]

I use an ION based Nettop for a link and it does fine with HD shows (TP streams from HDHR) AND it does fine with the MPEG2 content from my Analog tuners. What it has issues with is the HD PVR content when playing through BTV. If I play the same content through Media Center then I have ZERO issues.

[TomXP411]

Originally Posted by Jakesty

I thought that the ION graphics was supposed to be so much better than the Atom? Sounds like you're experiencing the same thing I am with the ATOM. HD shows are fine, MPEG compressed though suffer badly. Flash is also bad, but I haven't tried the new release to see if it's even acceptable.

MPEG recordings are fine - HD and SD. My old Atom/Intel netbook could not play HD recordings, and it would stutter even on MPEG-2 SD recordings in BTV Link... interestingly enough, though, it played the same video fine in Media Player.

I have not tried any HD H.264 recordings, since I don't have an HD-PVR any more. I need to activate iTunes on this computer, but a friend has my other netbook, and until she de-authorizes iTunes on that machine, I can't activate this one.

[DonK]

About iTunes Store authorization and deauthorization TomXP411, go to that page and read it.