Posted on July 4, 2021
Compaq Mini 701
Literally every vendor played the game during the Netbook era, with the Hewlett-Packard Company being no exception. With the COMPAQ brand belonging to HP since 2002, the Mini 701 was their second stake to acquire market shares.
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Historic Overview
Long gone are the days of Compaq as an individual company. Bought by the Hewlett-Packard Company in 2002, the brand was still in use by HP for various product lines until around 2013. In reality, the Compaq Mini 701 is an original HP design, not only competing with other vendors at the time, but also with HP itself, as there also existed an individual “HP Mini” netbook series, which is different from the Compaq Mini.
There where not many differentiating factors for Netbooks at the time. They had to be cheap, they had to be power conserving, they should be good enough for doing some simple internet and multimedia tasks on the go.
In order to license Windows at competitive pricing, but also not to cannibalize the upper market segments for Notebooks, Microsoft set some limits on the hardware specs elligible for Windows XP, and later Windows 7 Starter Edition: Maximum of 10.2″ display, maximum of 1 GiB RAM, maximum of 250 GiB Harddrive, only single-Core CPU with not more than 2 GHz clock.
The result: Most Netbooks where quiet similar to each other due to this corset, with most designs building on the Atom CPU and offering the same level of performance.
The Compaq Mini 701 is no exception. Solidly built, featuring a glare display, clare case finish, SmartCard reader, Bluetooth, Wired LAN and WiFi and some USB ports, it looks nice and has everything for the job on the go.
Like many competitors, Compaq also offered double-up capacity batteries, which, as opposed to other competing devices, would not stick out on the back, but buckle up on the underside. So with the bigger battery installed, the Compaq Mini would not lay flat on the desk but stay in a slight angle position. This becomes a slight problem in ergonomics in combination with the display, that has only a roughly 120° rotational angle limit. Another problem of this device: With the lid closed, the displays lays flat and a bit too close on the keyboard keys, which requires lots of cleaning on the glare display.
Speaking of cleaning needs: The gloss finish of the shell welcomes fingerprints as well. Yes, it looks nice, but it’s not practical.
Specs
The PHINTAGE Collection currently holds a Compaq Mini 701.
| Vendor | Compaq Computer Corporation |
| Model | Compaq Mini |
| Released | 2009 |
| Original Streetprice | 399 € |
| Weight | 1.14 kg |
| Dimensions | 26.2 cm x 16.7 cm x 2.5 cm |
| Builtin Display | 10.2″ WSVGA LED BrightView Display (glare), 1024 x 600 |
| Builtin Battery | double capacity: 4400mAh / 49Wh (swappable) |
| CPU | Intel Atom N270 @ 1.6 GHz |
| RAM | 2 GiB |
| Storage |
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| Network Support | Marvell Yukon 88E8040 PCI-E (10/100MBit/s) Broadcom 802.11a/b/g (a/b/g) Bluetooth |
| USB | YES, 2 x USB 2.0 |
| Video Output | n/a |
| Other | 1 smartcard reader, 1 Audio OUT 3.5mm, 1 proprietary expansion port, builtin webcam |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Starter Edition |
| Overall Condition |
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| Restoration Parts needed |
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| Benchmark Results | SiSoft Sandra 2004, CPU benchmark: CPU ALU Dhrystone: 5221 MIPS CPU Whetstone FPU: 1744 MFLOPS CPU Whetstone ISSE2: 2272 MFLOPS SiSoft Sandra 2004, Multimedia benchmark: Integer x4 ISSE: 10113 it/s Float x4 ISSE2: 19855 it/s SiSoft Sandra 99, CPU benchmark: CPU Dhrystone: 3339 MIPS CPU Whetstone: 1027 MFLOPS SiSoft Sandra 99, Multimedia benchmark: Integer ALU: 2311 it/s Floating Point FPU: 979 it/s Norton Utilities 3.1: Computing Index, relative to IBM/PC: N/A Norton Utilities 4.5: Computing Index, relative to IBM/XT: N/A Norton Utilies 8.0: CPU Speed: 936.2 |
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