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.

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Huge improvment by Samsung with the NC10 Netbook on some stuff, but I also miss some things on my Asus eee 901 netbook… my quick update is just around the corner.

UPDATE:
I need to admit that the public reviews hold strong when it comes to the NC10, the white version (the black one is a fingerprint magnet) is extremely good, the keyboard is just as large as it has to be, i.e. almost a full sizer.

9.5 points for a netbook that follows the main stream specs. The only thing that they missed was a card reader that wouldn’t leave 4mm of the card sticking out of the front body, making it rather unconvenient to use a SDHC card for ReadyBoost, secondary drive, or something else that would require the card to be permanently inserted.

Outside of that, I can’t really complain about anything. If you need a netbook, this is the one to get today.

Howdy! Just got my Asus ee PC 901 8.9″ netbook back from service so I’m trying it our to write this pos. I had it for 3 short weeks before the fan collapsed. Asus managed to get the tiny thing fixed in “only” 6 weeks (THAT is what is call great customer service). Anyway, there are heaps of good netbook reviews out there already so I’ll be very short and generic in my comments.

Over all, I really like the idea of the netbook, as personally, I do not spend time gaming nor do I handle my image/video editing on a laptop (that’s why I have my Mac Mini on my desk downstairs). The netbook fits perfectly the need of having a quick PC that gives you access to the Web, email and office products.

Overall, the products out there are great but there are a few things that they should have combined into one device to hit the sweet spot. Today, many of these features exist in separate products, I’m still hoping to see them together. I’m composing this improvement proposal as the quick and dirty specs for a highly competetive netbook that I would buy any second:

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