HP Mini 311: Netbooks get ION

HP Mini 311 — Windows Performance

We also ran tests to measure Windows boot/shutdown, hibernate/resume, and sleep/wake times. These can vary quite a bit between runs, but we ran these from an empty Windows desktop and used the best-case result for each system. We're going to limit the results to netbooks and low power/high battery life laptops in order to avoid polluting the graphs with data from other market segments. Our test HP Mini 311 comes equipped with 2GB RAM instead of 1GB, so performance in hibernate/resume tests should be slightly lower than competing netbooks with half the memory. The Gateway laptops are similarly equipped with 4GB, again making them slower in those tests.

Boot and shutdown times are longer than most of the competing laptops, but considering the other netbooks are running Windows XP — a noticeably lighter operating system — the times are about what we would expect. Hibernate/resume times are good, considering the extra memory. The system won't hibernate or resume instantly, but a delay of less than 20 seconds isn't bad at all. Finally, sleep and wake times are a mixed bag. No matter what we tried, the Mini 311 consistently took around 20 seconds (sometimes substantially more) to go to sleep. On the other hand, the system wakes up almost instantly. POST time on the Mini 311, incidentally, is moderately fast at 7.0 seconds. We've seen better, but we've also seen a lot worse.