While the netbook market is about to get a lot more crowded, the HP Mini-Note remains one of the most attractive looking low-cost mini-notebooks. It's got a slick, professional design that makes the Asus Eee PC look a bit like a kid's toy. But it also has a sluggish VIA C7-M CPU, compared with the Intel Celeron chip in most current Eee PC models and the Intel Atom CPU that Asus, Acer, and MSI will be including in upcoming machines.

So what do you do if you like the HP Mini-Note design, but want a bit of a performance boost? The folks at Geek.com decided to upgrade their unit. The CPU isn't easily replacable, but by unscrewing the keyboard you can get at the RAM and HDD.

Swapping the 1GB RAM stick for a 2GB stick is extraordinarily easy, while you have to be a bit more careful when replacing the hard drive. Most Mini-Note models ship with a 5400rpm hard drive. And although the computer can handle some 7200rpm drives, the PC already gets quite hot, so you want to be careful about putting any parts that could add to the heat problem inside the case. So Geek went with a 60GB solid state disk, which costs over $400. In other words, almost as much as you'd pay for the cheapest version of the Mini-Note computer itself.

Does it all make a difference? Geek reports that Windows Vista now boots in 1.5 minutes, compared with 2.5 minutes before the upgrades. Benchmarks also show improvements in hard disk performance. Not necessarily $400 worth of improvements, but improvements nonetheless.

For most folks, a RAM upgrade might make sense, especially if your system is running Windows Vista. But I'd probably hold off on upgrading the hard disk until after HP releases a new version of the Mini-Note with either an Intel Atom or VIA Nano CPU later this year.

Or you could just order an MSI Wind in a couple of weeks. It doesn't necessarily look quite as pretty as the Mini-Note, but it sports an Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and costs just $399 to $499.

You can pick up an HP Mini-Note with a 1.2GHz processor and 120GB hard drive for just $50 more than the 1.0GHZ/4GB SSD version. But if you buy the lower end model and then later decide you want a higher capacity hard drive, it's pretty easy to upgrade. HP Mini Note PC has step by step instructions, and a few photos showing the upgrade process.

In a nutshell, you need to remove the battery, and a few screws and lift the keyboard to access the hard drive enclosure. You can then unscrew your SSD or hard drive and replace it with another SATA hard drive.

Windows XP runs great on my Mini-Note. My only major complaint is that the 1280 x 768 screen is so sharp that I'm having a hard time reading some content. I've been toying with the idea of replacing Firefox with Opera for my portable browsing needs, since not only does Opera have a full page zoom feature (as opposed to Firefox 2's text-only zoom), but you can set a default zoom level so that every new page you open is properly zoomed. While Firefox 3 beta 5 has a full-page zoom option, you have to manually zoom each individual page.

But I'm getting off track. The point is, that my HP 2133 Mini-Note, with a 1.2GHz processor and a 120GB hard drive runs Windows XP about as well as any 4 or 5 year old computer would. In fact, the PC boots Windows XP in just about a minute, which is about the same amount of time it takes my Eee PC to get to a working desktop. Eventually HP plans to offer Mini-Note customers the option to purchase a system with Windows XP preloaded. But for now you can only get a Mini-Note with Windows Vista Business, Vista Home Basic, or SUSE Enterprise. And that's a real shame, because as Joanna Stern at Laptop Magazine has noted, it takes a full 2 minutes and 30 seconds to boot a Mini-Note running Windows Vista.

Now, boot times aren't the end all, be all. And everyone knows Vista takes longer to boot than XP on most systems. But having to wait 2 and a half minutes for your PC to load before you can start working at the coffee shop, on the train, or wherever you are... that's just silly. Stern managed to shave about a minute off of the boot time by customizing some settings (check out the Laptop Magazine blog to see how), but Vista still takes longer to start up than XP. Oh, and did I mention she's using a Mini-Note with a 1.6GHz processor, not a 1.2GHz chip like mine?

So next up, Stern decided to try upgrading the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. She'll be evaluating the performance over the next few days and posting her findings. But in the meantime, she shot a nifty little video showing how to upgrade the RAM in a Mini-Note.

It's not quite as simple as upgrading the RAM in most Eee PC models. While many Eee PC units include a RAM access panel on the bottom of the unit, in order to upgrade the RAM in a Mini-Note, you'll have to undo some screws in the battery case and remove the keyboard in order to pop out your RAM.

I had originally planned to do this upgrade myself. But honestly, in the few days I've been using my Mini-Note, I have yet to approach 1GB of memory use. I'm not sure there's much need for more than 1GB of RAM in an XP machine I'll be using primarily for web browsing and writing with a little audio editing on the side. But Vista is a much more resource-intensive operating system, so I imagine the RAM boost should help at least a little bit.

I did put 2GB of RAM in my Eee PC, but that's because the Eee PC has just 4GB of storage space, so I didn't want to dedicate any of that to swap space or a page file. If you pick up the 4GB solid state version of the Mini-Note, you might want to consider a RAM upgrade as well.