The Windows 7 RC, my HP Compaq 2510p and an SSD

Evening all,

I'm new here so be gentle

Anyhow, I've had my much enjoyed HP Compaq 2510p for some time now and although it's not the fastest machine in the world, I like the size, build and look of the thing.

Its a 1.2GHz U7600 dual core machine with a 60Gb HDD and 2Gb RAM.

I've always run XP Pro and been happy with it, but I have recently installed the Windows 7 RC. It runs very well indeed despite the slow processor etc. I like it a lot, I have to say. It's here for keeps, I think.

Nevertheless, I'd like to quicken things up a tad, and had in fact felt like that before I went from XP Pro to W7RC.

So along comes an MTRON MOBI 3000 32Gb 1.8" ZIF IDE SSD. Lovely jubbly, that should perk things up a bit. Some will view 32Gb as a bit small but I want the OS, MS Office 2007, some work files and the EVE Online client on the machine and that's about it. I think 32Gb should be enough.

Out goes the battery, off comes the HDD cover. 2 screws to release the old HDD, er, unscrewed. I undid the ZIF, replaced HDD with the new SSD and put it all back together.

Booted the 2510p and it recognised the drive and started to boot from the W7RC DVD that I bunged in the optical drive.

Failed.

The W7RC bombed out almost immediately saying it had a problem with (I think) /boot/cd.

I wonder if this is because it doesn't have the required drivers for the SSD? Or if it needs there to be at least one partition on the drive for it to work. Or is my DVD a bit jiggered?

Anyone with any experience of this stuff who cares to offer advice? It'd be well appreciated, that's for sure. I'm currently considering:
(a) burning a new DVD just in case
(b) getting a caddy for the SSD and just putting 1 empty partition on it then trying again.

Cheers

mlh

 

were there any master/slave jumpers on your original hard drive and if so, did you jumper the new SSD to match?

 

Can't see any jumpers on it. Not used to 1.8" ZIF drives so might not be finding them.

 

Glad to hear you enjoy the 2510P, a sendiment seen from quite a few 2510P owners.

Your Win7 install from DVD sounds like the DVD is stuffed, or something went wrong with the burn. Not a real problem, easiest to just extract the downloaded ISO files and run the 'setup' from within XP. Works fine.

Win7RC1 performance
The bottleneck with Win7RC1 is the Aero interface using 2510P's X3100 3D graphics. Since the 2510P is single channel RAM config only, it works about 65% of the speed of a dual-channel X3100 config, so it's a bit on the slow side. A couple of ways to speed this up:

Use setfsb overclocking. My Aero Desktop score went up from 2.4 to 2.9 with a [email protected] (667Mhz) FSB overclock. You can certainly feel the difference in performance, with very little decrease, if any, on battery life. Rumours suggest final Win7 will deliver faster Aero 3D performance, a drawcard to purchase the product. Author of GMABooster may add X3100 support (if he figures it out), potentially allowing the 2510P's X3100 Core Render Clock to increase from 400Mhz to 500Mhz.

Changing to a a basic theme disabling Aero, making Win7 as snappy as XP, but faster to boot. A pleasure to use.

Mtron master/slave issues
Your Mtron and optical drive share the PATA bus. The DVD is firmware set to be slave. Ensure the mtron is master (should be by default). If there is a prob with master/slave then it would usually give a bios bootup error, or take exceedingly long to boot. The supplied Toshiba 1.8" ZIF HDD defaults to master but can be changed to slave by connecting pin 1 and pin 2. You'd want the mtron to be master.

Jay2K1 has mtron and 2510P working successfully, so if your DVD doesn't work with it then perhaps there is some issue unique with your system?

There are other 1.8" ZIF SSD offerings if the mtron proves too small, or problematic. 64GB mtron arrives Q3 2009.

More tweaking of the 2510P
There's heaps more info on what you can do with the 2510P in the 2510p - SATA SDD/HDD & CPU upgrades thread. A nice addition to your primary 1.8" ZIF mtron SSD would be an optical bay caddy and a 1.8" to 2.5" adapter, both for very little $$ on ebay. The combo allowing the use of the 60GB 1.8" HDD in optical bay caddy, hotswappable with original optical drive as needed. One of the best ways of speeding up the 2510P and extending the storage, while still having excellent battery life.

 

Crikey, now that's what I call a comprehensive reply - thanks a lot! Plenty to think about here.

I agree that the DVD is most likely u/s. I have used it before successfully but it is a bit scuffed and that has probably killed it.

I can't tell how to set the SSD to master - there don't appear to be any jumpers I can see. Mind you, I'm not familiar with ZIF so I'll do a little googling for info on that. There's no BIOS error though and it doesn't seem to take long to boot. I'm going to re-do the DVD first.

Thanks again for such a comprehensive reply!

Cheers

mlh

 

I wish I'd taken time to reply before. Sorry!

Anyhow, my Compaq 2510p is now running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit (the full release, not the RC) on its SSD very happily indeed. It doesn't have the largest amount of free space left over but I don't think it has a problem over that.

I play EVE Online on this machine in the evenings and it is suffering a bit of flickering during game play, which may be the on board graphics or might be the EVE client - not sure.

Otherwise, couldn't be happier.

Thanks for the guidance and advice - much appreciated.

 

2510P Owner's Lounge is now summarized with quite a few tweaks and performance upgrades listed.

Eg: to increase storage could consider a pata or sata-to-pata caddy with 2.5" HDD + optionally convert DVD to a external USB unit. For the graphics stutter, I'd suggest a 1.4-1.5Ghz to provide a noticable improvement in performance. For radically faster graphics consider the DIY ViDock which uses a desktop video card with external LCD connected via the mini PCIe slot usually hosting the wifi.