My failed effort at an ISS Tracker web kiosk reminded me of my previous failure trying to get Ubuntu Core web kiosk up and running on old hardware. That computer, a Dell Latitude X1, was also very sluggish running modern Ubuntu Mate interactively when I had tried it. I was curious how it would compare with the HP Mini.

The HP Mini has the advantage of age: it is roughly ten years old, whereas the X1 is around fifteen years old. When it comes to computers, an age difference of five years is a huge gulf spanning multiple hardware generations. However, the X1 launched as a top of the line premium machine for people who were willing to pay for a thin and light machine. Hence it was designed under very different criteria than the HP Mini despite similarity in form factor.

As one example: the HP Mini housed a commodity 2.5" laptop hard drive, but the Dell Latitude X1 used a much smaller form factor hard drive that I have not seen before or since. Given its smaller market and lower volume, I think it is fair to assume the smaller hard drive comes at a significant price premium in exchange for reduction of a few cubic centimeters in volume and grams of weight.

Installing Ubuntu Mate 18.04 on the X1, I confirmed it is still quite sluggish by modern standards. However, this is a comparison test and the Dell X1 surprised me by feeling more responsive than the five years younger HP Mini. Given that they both use spinning platter hard drives and had 1GB of RAM, I thought the difference is probably due to their CPU. The Latitude X1 had an ULV (ultra low voltage) Pentium M 744 processor, which was a premium product showcasing the most processing power Intel can deliver while sipping gently on battery power. In comparison the HP Mini had an Atom processor, an entry-level product optimized for cost. Looking at their spec sheet comparison shows how closely an entry level CPU matches up to a premium CPU from five years earlier, but the Atom had only one quarter of the CPU cache and I think that was a decisive difference.

Despite its constrained cache, the Atom had two cores and thermal design power (TDP) of just 2.5W. In contrast the Pentium M 733 ULV had only a single core and TDP of 5W. Twice the cores, half the electrical power, the younger CPU far more power efficient. And it's not just the CPU, either, it's the whole machine. Whereas the HP Mini 110 only needed 7.5W to display ESA ISS Tracker, the Latitude X1 reports drawing more than double that. A little over 17W, according to upower. An aged battery, which has degraded to 43% of its original capacity, could only support that for about 40 minutes.

Device: /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0
native-path: BAT0
vendor: Sanyo
model: DELL T61376
serial: 161
power supply: yes
updated: Thu 23 Apr 2020 06:19:06 PM PDT (69 seconds ago)
has history: yes
has statistics: yes
battery
present: yes
rechargeable: yes
state: discharging
warning-level: none
energy: 11.4663 Wh
energy-empty: 0 Wh
energy-full: 11.4663 Wh
energy-full-design: 26.64 Wh
energy-rate: 17.2605 W
voltage: 12.474 V
time to empty: 39.9 minutes
percentage: 100%
capacity: 43.0417%
technology: lithium-ion
icon-name: 'battery-full-symbolic'
History (rate):
1587691145 17.261 discharging

Putting a computer to work showing the ESA tracker is only using its display. It doesn't involve the keyboard. Such information consumption tasks are performed just as well by touchscreen devices, and I have a few to try. Starting with an Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7.