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Upgrade, maintenance and cleaning of an HP Mini 210-1100

A friend needed help with her netbook. It became so slow that it was impossible to use. Also it was running with Windows 7. While this is a good Operating System, it won’t be supported by January 2020. Budget: £0. Challenge accepted!


The upgrade

After reviewing the capacity of the netbook, I understood why it was struggling so much. The 1GB RAM Memory with an Intel Atom N450 Processor at 1.66GHz won’t provide the best user experience after an upgrade to Windows 10. Sure it will meet the minimum specs, but it will be slow.

My suggestion went onto install a light Operating System: xubuntu. It would require a bit a learning curve for my friend, but it will offer all the basics she needs: browsing on the Internet, creating and editing spreadsheets, reading her emails, etc.

Once installed, I added a couple of softwares she was familiar with, tested the Internet, the speed and changed few settings. I was able to be on the home page within 1 minutes.


The cleaning

Before to hand back the netbook, I decided to give it a good cleaning.

Good cleaning on the entire body of the netbook, I also cleaned her screen and the most difficult: the keyboard.

It was worthy though. Look at the difference before and after


Handing back

After all that work, I met her back to give her netbook over. Not fully ready yet, I connected the netbook onto her WiFi and showed her how to access the different applications she would need, how to install new applications with the app store, where to find her documents, etc.

Of course I reassured her that if she couldn’t handle the new OS, just to let me know. A cheap upgrade could be done to replace the old hard drive for a new SSD and to increase the RAM memory.

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