HP Mini 2140 Notebook: SSD Upgrade and installing Windows XP Professional for Significant Performance Improvements
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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