HP Mini-Note gets a performance boost courtesy of new VIA drivers

Posted June 25, 2008 at 11:36 AM by Robert Nelson

Section: Computers, Mobile Computers, Laptops, Web, Online Music/Video

HP Mini-Note users listen up, VIA has just released an updated set of drivers that seem to be well worth the time it will take to complete the update. Now don’t get me wrong this update is not going to completely change your trusty little notebook, but the update has been noted as offering improved video playback, which for a lot of people has been a major issue.

According to the benchmarks from the folks over at HP 2133 Guide, they are claiming that the “video playback was improved quite a bit on each OS.” They ran the benchmarks on a Windows XP (with SP3) and Windows Vista (with SP1) based Mini-Note that featured a 1.6Ghz VIA C7-M processor, 2GB of RAM, and the standard 120GB 7200 RPM hard drive.

Based on their results the performance on the XP based Mini-Note offered “perfect full or small screen” YouTube viewing and “almost perfect” small screen Hulu viewing with “better but not really watchable” full screen viewing. On the Vista based Mini-Note the results were similar except that full screen viewing with Hulu was “still pretty bad” and YouTube suffered a little bit if you opened another web page in the background while the video was playing.

Overall it seems to be good news, head on over and grab the new drivers. Personally I have been using the Mini-Note (same specs as above) to view video, not as much YouTube, but instead Hulu and although it has not been great it was watchable for me. While I did not do any benchmarking myself, these drivers do seem to have offered a bit of improvement.

Via [jkOnTheRun]