Windows 10 "refresh" on the HP Mini 110-3700

It was never the fastest of computers but my HP Mini 110 had been running increasingly slowly.

I have taken the free upgrade to Windows 10 from the Windows 7 starter edition it came with and while everything worked it was all a bit slow (or very slow if you were impatient !).

I wanted to clean it out and start again with a cleanish install to limit all the stuff that wanted to run on startup.

My concern was that I would lose the "bundled" Office 2010 Starter Edition (which came with Windows 7) if I did a refresh.

A Google suggested that there was a Click to Run Bootstrapper that would reinstall it.

I decided to give it a go.

At the first attempt the refresh process seemed to get stuck (or perhaps I was impatient).

I had a second attempt and gave it a couple of hours to do its stuff.

Everything seemed to work OK  in Operating Systems terms and it certainly seemed no worse in speed terms and was perhaps a bit better.

Loads of stuff had been removed and I carefully picked a few drivers and programs to put back.

HP offer driver downloads (Windows 7 only) at:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-mini-110-3700-pc-series/5082187/model/5082189

but actually I didn't need any of these, I previously had a full set of working drivers under Windows 10 and those all seemed to survive working although lots of drivers were in the "removed programs" list.

Restoring the Office 2010 Starter Edition was a bit more tricky.

The bootstrap installer " setupconsumerc2rolw.exe " was mildly hard to find

https://windowsten.info/filedata/fetch?id=4179&d=1426944590 seems a source but I used

https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/get-your-office-2010-starter-edition-download-here.73121/

A very useful post by " Metanis " gave the following:

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/6255-microsoft-office-starter-2010.html

He also correctly points out that if you install this after doing a clean OS installation it won't run (not compatible with this version of windows) until until you install https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2598285

After that my Office 2010 Starter Edition seems to work and any light document editing of spreadsheeting seems to work fine.

All in all it seems better and I won't be installing much more on the machine to attempt to keep it running OK.

Acer Extensa 5220 and Windows 7

I've had an old laptop with Windows XP Professional on it for probably 10 years.

Vista was current when I bought it but I wanted XP to use with some other stuff.

Now XP is well out of support and I wanted another machine to run some fairly undemanding applications but XP wasn't really usable.

I could have bought another machine but I would have really wanted a machine with an SSD and this was going to be many hundreds of pounds.

So....

Looking at e-bay, I could buy a (spinning disk) HD for about £10 and some sort of "recycled" Windows 7 licence for a few pounds and that looked OK, but would the hardware all work ?

Fitting the hard disk was a doddle. The bottom panel comes off easily for service (unlike the newer machines) and it was the work of minutes to put the new SSD in.

The licence came with a link to download the required ISO for an install disk and I burnt that to a DVD.

A fiddle in the BIOS to get the boot sequence to start off DVD and it all booted to the install DVD.

That did it's stuff for a couple of hours and Windows 7 32 bit was running OK on the laptop. Not what one might call "zippy" but OK.

The laptop has 2GB of RAM and 160GB of hard disk.

I triggered windows update and it found 190 ish to do.

I left it to it.

Also the Internet Explorer wanted an update but was so old it didn't seem to want to download a new version.

It would install Chrome so I did that, then downloaded a newer IE using Chrome.

Finally I had a working computer but two devices that were not recognised.

The WiFi is fine (except that the physical switch state isn't remembered over a reboot so WiFi always starts "on") but I wanted the two devices to have drivers.

The first device which talked about "communications" was an infrared device which Windows found a driver for itself after having a try online.

The mass storage device driver couldn't be found.

A good Googling got me to an Acer driver site (as well as a number of other dodgy sites !)

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/GB/content/support-product/714?b=1

That had a card reader driver which sorted the final mystery device and also a driver for infrared which I didn't try (as this was fixed and I've never used it).

So Acer Extensa 5220 working fine (if a bit slowly) on Windows 7. It is a "mains laptop" as the battery seems poorly but for a limited application usable and saved from the electrical recycling for a few years.