HP Mini 311 Will Allow Serious Upgrades After Windows 7

When is  a netbook not a netbook? When it has anything better than the 1 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive and Intel GMA chipset seen almost uniformly across all manufacturers. And it looks like HP will be the first to break the mold with its HP Mini 311 netbook. Based on the Mini 311’s service guide, buyers will be able to upgrade their netbooks from junky to halfway decent, with up to two extra GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive, an 80 GB solid state drive, the full NVidia ION platform for graphics acceleration and either Windows 7 Starter, Basic, Premium of Professional.

Now, the service guide is just a manual for installing your own upgrades to an existing computer. So this news doesn’t necessarily mean HP will start selling these improvements directly. And even if they were available off the bat, there’s no word on price, and I imagine adding lots of RAM, a graphics card and full Windows 7 to a netbook could get pricey. Still, the suggestion here is that netbooks won’t be bound to the dismal specs I listed at the top of this piece. It was reported earlier this year that Microsoft is limiting the hardware in netbooks in order to draw a line in the sand between them and netbooks. This should help kick up the sand a little. [MyHPMini via Engadget]