[N140] N140 Windows 7

[dezmond]

My win7 story so far:

Upgraded the memory to 2GB, there's a hatch at the bottom of the case and the single DDR2 SO-DIMM is easily accessible. The shop didn't have any 800Mhz memory so I got a stick of 2GB Kingston 667Mhz RAM. As it turns out the laptop only has a 533Mhz bus so it's fine.

I didn't want to mess with Samsung's standard install, in case I ever need to send the machine back, so I popped in a 160 gig hitachi drive I had lying around. One thing to note is that the samsung drive draws 0.85 amps at 5v, and the hitachi only draws 0.7 amps. Every little helps! I plan on replacing this with an SSD in a few weeks.

Prepped an install of Win7 on to my USB stick, as described on these forums. HP tool didn't work for me, but luckily diskpart from Vista worked fine. I didn't time it, but the whole install took less than half an hour, running on battery. Pretty damn good I think.

Out of the box everything works except WLAN. And for some reason the latest driver available from Samsung (which is marked WinXP) installs fine, but can't connect to WPA2 encrypted network. I found a newer version of the driver on x-drivers.com (1676). Being paranoid, I scanned it first with ESET NOD32 on my machine, then set up the netbook with NOD32 antivirus, then took encryption off my network and updated the antivirus, and only then did I install the driver. The good news is no trojan alerts popped up and it seems to be working fine.
http://www.x-drivers.com/catalog/dri...190/13170.html

I did notice when I took the netbook apart that the connectors for the wireless aerials aren't fully tucked in. I pressed in on the headers to fully engage the contacts. I know some people reported weak wifi signal and intermittent disconnects. I didn't test the netbook long enough yet, but this could be the reason.

BIOS changes: I enabled the setting to only charge the battery to 80% (battery life extender or something similar). I also enabled no execute bit, since Win7 supports DEP.

Battery life seems pretty good, I haven't tweaked any settings yet and I kept all the eye candy on. Updating the drivers at the moment, just because I'm particular that way, but otherwise the only thing needed beside the Win7 is a wifi driver for Realtek RTL8192E card.

Update: I decided to check the ethernet connection, plugged in the cable and powered up the netbook and BOOM, big blue screen of death, memory failure, blah blah. Disaster! Unplugged the cable - everything works fine! I figure Windows7 has wrongly recognized the LAN chip and installed the wrong drivers for it. After digging through the Realtek site I found a working Win7 driver for it and it's a much newer version than the XP driver offered by Samsung. Installed, rebooted and voila - everything works fine!
Win7 auto installation program: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/...;GetDown=false

Update: Opened the little notebook again, my SSD drive arrived today. I picked up a cheapy 32gig Patriot Warp v2 for 85 euro off eBay. I replaced the 160gig 5400rpm drive with the SSD and re-installed everything. I have to say, this is the most noticable system upgrade I've seen. It now takes 12 seconds to boot into Windows!

Photos of the internals:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/4072683...7622485818782/

[dezmond]

Actually, how do you get to the hard drive in this netbook?

I found where the memory is - it's listed in the manual, but no word about the hard drive

[Zaroff]

Same as the NC10... You have to dismantle it, voiding your warranty in the process.

[dezmond]

Ah sweet!

I wouldn't worry too much about warranty, if there aren't any seals to be broken there's no way anyone can prove the case has been opened

[dezmond]

Edited the first post rather than add on to the thread, I'll do the same with updates if there are any

[dezmond]

I've added some photos of the internals if anyone's interested:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/4072683...7622485818782/

[Alfihar]

@dezmond: Thanks for the photos.

That's quite interesting,they've started using a half size mini-PCIe card for wifi.

The cooling system looks like it's been cut down a bit or rather the cooling plate appears to be improved, there now appears to only be one connector for the screen instead of separate connections for the screen, webcam and backlight. On the up side it looks like the power socket would be easy to replace if you broke it.

It looks like there is one accessible usb connector for the Bluetooth module by the PS/2 connector for the touchpad on the front edge.

[dezmond]

There's one USB port on the left and two on the right, unless of course you mean some internal USB header that I've missed

[jez]

Good stuff! Dezmond, would you mind if I highlighted some of this info in a front page post, full credit to yourself of course!

[dezmond]

of course mate, work away. if there's any more info just let me know.

it's my wife's netbook, i've been setting it up over the last few days and was mighty impressed with the little beast. i want to hear what she's going to say after working with it for a few weeks.