This HP Mini netbook was the oldest of three laptops in this NUCC-sponsored research project. As a netbook, it was a very limited and basic machine even when new, and that was around ten years ago. A lot has changed in the computing world since then.

Today, its 32-bit only CPU limits robot brain applications, as only the older ROS Kinetic LTS released prebuilt 32-bit binaries. Outside of robot brain applications, any modern graphical user interface is sluggish on this machine. From Chrome OS up through Windows 10 and everything in between. When running Ubuntu Mate, it actually felt worse than a Raspberry Pi running the same operating system, which came as a surprise. Both had ~1GHz CPUs and 1GB of RAM. And even though a 10-year old Atom could outperform a modern ARM CPU, the 10-year old Intel integrated graphics processor has fallen well behind a modern ARM's graphics core.

So it appears the best position for this machine is in running command line computing or data processing tasks that work well on old low-end Intel 32-bit chips. It would be a decent contender for the type of projects that today we would think of running on a Raspberry Pi. With the caveat of weaker graphics effects, it offers the following advantages over a Raspberry Pi:

  • Intel x86 (32-bit) instruction set.
  • Higher resolution screen than the standard Raspberry Pi touchscreen.
  • Keyboard (minus the N key in this particular example)
  • Touchpad
  • Battery for portable use
  • Actual data storage device in the form of a SATA drive, not a microSD card.

It is also the only one of the three NUCC machines to have a hard wire Ethernet port. As someone who's been burned by wireless communication issues more than once, this is a pretty significant advantage over the rest of the machines in my book.