Installing Windows 7 RC1 on HP Mini 1000 (1030NR)
There are plenty of places that will tell you how to install Windows 7 on an HP Mini 1000 using a bootable USB or DVD drive but I didn’t have either and ran into a few problems because of this. Here is how I managed to get Windows 7 installed on my 16GB drive:
I have an external hard drive so I downloaded the .iso from Microsoft ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx ) and then used WinRar to unpack the .iso to a folder on my external drive. Then I started cleaning up every bit of space possible on my main drive but even though I had more than the disk space needed according to the setup wizard, setup would not begin because it said I didn’t have enough free space. I found through trial and error that the disk space needed was around 9.3GB and the only way I was able to get this much space was by going to the properties of the C drive and checking the “compress this drive” box. If you have a large enough USB drive or an external DVD drive, I would highly recommend installing that way instead.
Windows 7 seems as fast as XP was on this machine, surprisingly fast. There are a few issues I have ran into, though.
1. you can’t change the text size in Windows now. The “125%” size was available in earlier releases but now that option is grayed out and you get a message that says “You can’t change this setting because the height of your display is less than 600 pixels.” Doh. Hopefully they’ll correct this in the final version.
2. almost everything worked “out of the box” as far as hardware. The added features of the touchpad (scrolling, etc) did not, so I downloaded and installed the Vista driver from Synaptics ( http://drivers.synaptics.com/Synaptics_Driver_v10_1_8_Vista32.exe ).
3. Aero ran surprisingly well but I decided to go with the “basic” theme instead to save processing power.
4. I’m loving the new keyboard shortcuts. Windows+Up Arrow to maximize windows is nice.
5. Media Center has been improved in places but there isn’t enough media on this machine to really play with that.
Tags: technology, Windows 7