HP Mini 210 has easy snap-off bottom, not-so-easy hard drive upgrades though

January 17, 2010 8 Comments

While we patiently wait for our Pine Trail netbooks to arrive at our end of the continent, our European friends have been posting their unboxing videos left and right.

I’ll just mention that NetbookNews Italy has an unboxing of the Acer Aspire One 532 and nDevil from Germany also unboxed his netbook, the HP Mini 210. What I really found interesting was nDevil’s discovery on how to upgrade the Mini 210.

In his video on how to upgrade the RAM for the HP Mini 210, he revealed that this netbook needs no screws to remove. You merely have to remove the battery an press on a couple of latches to pop off the bottom of the netbook and you now have access to the internals right there! This is probably one of the easiest netbooks to upgrade since no extra tools are required.

It’s not all good news though. It seems swapping out the hard drive is a bit more complex. You need to unscrew the keyboard (yes, it still has screws) and the entire top part just to get to the drive. Why HP, why? You giveth and you taketh away.

The RAM can easily be snapped out though for easy replacement. The same goes for the mini PCIe WiFi card and there’s a spare mini PCIe slot for additional upgrades as well.

Kudos to nDevil’s mom for giving him the idea on how to remove the bottom of the netbook.

via liliputing

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  • junktony

    This info is wrong! hard drive is easy to remove. Just unpeel the label that is on top of it with model information on it. Then pull up on the tab on the opposite end from the memory bay first. Once you have the little rubber mounts clear of the case, slide the drive away from the memory bay. You then just need to unplug the connector – simple! No screws needed.

    I have replaced mine with a 256gb Samsung flash drive.

  • http://www.kostservicesinc.com kost services

    thats a great 3G thingy i must say!!!!!!

  • http://www.kostservicesinc.com kost services

    thats a great 3G thingy i must say!!!!!!

  • KKB

    I have replaced mine HP Mini 210-1025la with a 500 GB Wester Digital SATA Drive and DDR2 RAM 2GB.

    - Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bits
    - Windows XP SP3
    - MacOS Leopard (iDeneb)
    - Linux Ubuntu

    This machine works very good.

  • TWellsian

    Confirming @junktony, below, you do NOT need to remove keyboard to get at HDD. Just unpeel the bottom label very carefully, ease out the 4 rubber feet and unplug the SATA lead. Easy! But if you were thinking of wiping, or downgrading to a spare XP, be aware that a new HDD needs an HP-proprietary, hidden, boot partition 0 (else it will not read partition 1). If partition 0 is copied over, it will then look for Windows 7 on 1, and XP-install still won't find any 'C:'. No probs if you clone the old 3-partition drive and run 7. May be OK with grub for linux (untried). Might work if you risk changing the bios to the XP version (I didn't). But now I like the 7 that was there – Oh Noes!

  • Ckasux

    as well it has a sim card slot for your next g telstra sim

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