This weekend on a flying visit through the dreaded PCWorld Store I noticed that the price of the Linux variant of the HP2133 was being sold with a heafy discount (cheaper on ebuyer but nevermind). I have been after a netbook for a few months and the design and specs where what I was looking for, the express card option being the biggest winner as I need it for my datacard.

On first boot SuSE had to do its VM Install, took sometime but I was impressed with the little VIA CPU, compared to my mates eeePC 700 it was very much quicker off the mark.

SuSE 10 SP1 was ok for basic use however it is still very dated and most of the wares on there are now superseeded by there vastly updated counterparts. I tried to register for the SP2 update, however I noticed HP are kind enough not to provide you with a key.

Searching online only comes up with negative results. I noticed a number of users on this forum stated HP are providing Restore/Update CDs, 5 minutes later the nice people at HP had dispatched my CDs for delivery in 8-10days.

After some much needed googling I decided to throw on OpenSuSE, not being a OpenSuSE fan I was out of my Fedora/Ubuntu comfort zone. OpenSuSE 11.1 is sluggish and not really designed to perform on the netbook. The GPU issues (I hope will get resolved) caused me to doubt the install and the overall performance of the bloated SuSE edition was bad enough for me to go to Windows.

XP - the holy grail...

I had two XP cds one with SP3 and one with SP3 and SATA driver installed. As I knew the VIA Sata driver was on the latter disc I tried that but found that it would not detect any drives. Puzzelled I switched the Sata option in the Bios to Compatible and set off again.

Once again it failed, much googling followed and I didn't see anyone else having this issue, however no one had stated they used a Sata ready CD, excited I popped in the original CD.....BANG...Disk Drive Detected!

The XP install was smooth and fast.

I read the installer guides with regards to installation, and used a combi of them all. HP have done a better job now by providing decent drivers, the 3D Guard worked without a hitch. Only the GPU driver gave me some issues, I don't think it has been signed correctly, but no matter it all works.

XP really does perform well, once some further tweaks where done with graphical settings and system services it boots up in half the time of SuSE.

Overall I have been impressed with how something so small works so well, I have always had powerful notebooks but as a netbook goes I am tempted to stick with the VIA CPU's over the Atom. Not every manufacturer is providing you with something so stylish either, for the price £220 giving you a metal body compared to the cheapo shiny plastic ones is a bonus and something you only see generally on the top end notebooks.

My shopping list for the netbook is to replace the 1gig of ram with 2gb, should give a minor boost in performance.