I remember why i hate nVidia Chipsets...

[MaxRat]

I had some free time before the weekend so I thought I would do a little tinkering. I am one of those people who sometimes just cannot leave well enough alone.

I have a nice little HP-mini 311-1025NR Atom/ION netbook that I picked up pretty cheap nicely used from a friend of mine. It has Windows 7 Home Premium installed on a Seagate 250gb hard drive with an added 2gb ddr3 in addition to the 1gb on board ram.

I use this mostly for tinkering and Auto Diagnostic work so it doesnt get use other than when i am tinkering online or setting up a router or doing Auto Diagnostics.

Beings it had a 5400rpm hard drive it was kind of a turd in performance terms. Late last year I had a friend offer me up a couple of Kingston V+100 96gb SSD drives. I decided beings I had them sitting around I would pop one in the mini and load it up and see how it would perform.

The first attempt I installed it I forgot it was 32-bit architecture and I did not have any 32-bit installers of Windows 7 and at that point I put the old hard drive back in and just surfed on until I acquired the 32-bit installer.

Later on after I sourced the correct ISO via Microsoft and loaded it up to a flash drive I once again installed the SSD and installed Win7 Home Premium. Sitting at the desktop before any updates I was greeted to a nice bench run of 220MB/s Read speeds and 145MB/s write speeds according to Crystal Disk Mark.

It was at this time I found when I went to activate windows the netbook had an Upgrade key...Now doing the old trick up upgrading over the top of the fresh install worked and soon I was once again up and running and sitting at the desktop. While I was sitting there I decided to run the benchmark again and was greeted with slower times? this time I got 190MB/s Read speeds and 135MB/s Write speeds.

Now the drop in speeds didnt really concern me as much so I wrote it off as just the double install. Loaded up MSE and started doing updates. Some of them Failed and I spent some time figuring out why.

I look to the Device Manager and see a yellow flag on Co-processor, more importantly the chipset. Windows Update could not find any drivers as it didnt know what it was. After a quick Google it was the nVidia Chipset so I headed to the HP site and nabbed the correct chipset driver. It was a nVidia installer.

When installing I got the pop-up for the Nvidia Drivers SMU, Ethernet and Storage driver. Knowing I did not need an Ethernet driver I installed the other two. This turned out to be a bad idea. The install became glitchy and when I ran the speed test after the drivers installed the speeds were 72MB/s Reads and 32MB/s Writes. Uninstalling the drivers nor rolling them back fixed the issue. Even System Restore wouldnt fix it.

I decided from there to just load Parted Magic and Erase the SSD. After loading up Parted Magic I loaded the SSD Erase program and ran it as it takes very little time. Usually about 10 seconds or so.

From that point I loaded up win 7 again fresh installed and used aspare key I had so i wouldnt need to double install and not worrying about trying to figure out activation. Before doing anything I updated the drivers except for the nvidia chipset driver. After the driver installs I ran Crystal Diskmark again I was greeted to 210MB/s Read speeds and 189MBs Write speeds... pretty good huh?

I decided to take a chance beings the nVidia drivers borked the install I nabbed the latest ION Chipset drivers direct from nVidia... knowing from back in the 939 days NOT to install the nVidia Storage drivers or the Ethernet drivers (as I didn't remember til now) I just installed the SMU driver...

That did the trick... the SMU was the only driver I needed and the rest are BAD news...So 3 installs later I ham running a SSD in the netbook and I gotta say it really made a world of difference.

This thing is actually usable for the most part now and has picked up on the Index scores. other than the sad 2.2 CPU score it manages pretty well. Other than the driver issue it's not so bad

I'll probably keep it around for a while now

Monday morning long post waiting for drywall mud to dry