Gamaze

I recently switched my Samsung NC10 netbook for an HP Mini 2140 HD to be able to really use it as my main laptop. The only really restricting factor with the NC10 has been the screen resolution as I find the Intel Atom based netbooks perfectly fine for basic work such as email, Internet, and even heavy MS Office usage (I still use my Mac Mini for sporadic photo and video editing). Therefore, when the HP Mini 2140 HD edition with a bright but glossy 1366×768 screen resolution was finally available a couple of months back I did not hesitate to upgrade. The NC10 was a great device itself but limited to the “standard netbook” 1024×600 resolution – just a little too much scrolling for my taste.

As I got the HP Mini 2140 with XP Home edition and a 160GB HDD I had 2 things I wanted to fix to get the most out of it. Upgrading the HDD to an SSD to significantly improve performance and battery life as well as upgrade it to XP Pro for some features I needed (remote access, advanced file sharing, etc.). This is usually an easy task but with the HP Mini 2140 it required some extra work as Windows XP installations does not recognize the SATA HDD/SSD drive by default so  I decided to document the steps in this post.

Before I settled for XP Pro SP3, I did a few weeks of Windows 7 RC1 testing and got really tired of the short battery life and constant noise of the CPU fan as the CPU was running much hotter with Windows 7 (same for Vista). With XP Pro SP3, even without the SSD installed I got roughly 15-20% more battery life than with Windows 7. This is based on my everyday usage experience and not scientific tests with battery eating software in a lab environment.

I also settled for a more expensive solid state disk,  the second generation Corsair P128 SSD codenamed CMFSSD-128GBG2D, with theoretical read and write speeds of 200 MB/s. Installing it caused a significant jump in battery life without mentioning the significant improvement in responsiveness and boot time for of the 2140. Furthermore, using stand by mode is now a pleasure as sleep and wake up is very fast. You can see the CrystalDiskMark test results below revealing that away from the 4K Write speed the SSD performance is very good considering the netbook hardware it is connected to.

Just as a reference point, with the 6-cell battery (stamped with “55 Wh”) I’m now enjoying 5-6 hours of battery life with a Corsair P128 SSD installed compared to the 3-4.5 hours I got with the previous 160GB Toshiba low energy HDD spinning inside. This is still far from the 6 respective 8 hours promised by HP but I’m sure these figures are measured in a less than real usage experience setup. I can easily say I’m happy with the upgrade to an SSD and downgrade from Windows 7 to XP Pro SP3.   Sure, I miss the Win 7 eye-candy a little but in the end of the day, for basic work the user experiences between the OS versions are not that far apart regardless of the age of XP. I highly recommend this setup to anyone that appreciates netbook responsiveness and long battery life.

Below are the tricks you have to do to get everything running smoothly, but first the needed inventory:

1. A Phillips screwdriver for removing the keyboard and drives (6 screws)
2. An external USB DVD drive
3. An XP Pro SP3 install CD/DVD
4. A Windows based computer with an internet connection to prepare the installation
5. An SSD drive, e.g. the Corsair P128 SSD
6. About 1-2 hours of spare time

And then to the action plan (HP also provides some instructions for recognizing SATA drives for further details) :

1. Download and install the latest version of nLite on your Windows computer. This is needed to patch the Windows XP installation to recognize the SATA based SSD drive (same goes for HDDs in this laptop).
2. Download the Intel SATA drivers for patching the XP installation CD. Unpack the ZIP file to a folder you can easily find later in the process.
3. Patch the XP installation CD with the downloaded SATA drivers and burn the new installation CD to a CD/DVD media. See detailed instructions here.
4. Replace the HDD with the SSD, once again detailed instructions are available here. Even if this is for the HP 2133 the only difference to the 2140 is that the you do not have to care about the mentioned separate SATA-to-motherboard connector as that does not exist in the HP 2140.
5. Connect your USB DVD player and boot from your freshly patched XP installation CD by pressing F9 immediately after powering on the HP 2140. This gives you the boot options menu.
6. Run through the normal XP installation process, this patched XP installation CD should now find your SSD without any issues. If not, then please go back to step 1 or try to disable native SATA support as described on the HP support site.
7. Download the required XP drivers from HP’s website, e.g. here to get all the hardware working. I highly recommend installing the Intel Chipset drivers first, rebooting and then continuing with the rest. The HP 3D DriveGuard software is not required with a SSD.

…and we are good to go!

Mattias Netbook, Tutorials HP 2140, installation, Netbook, SATA, SSD, XP