User blog:Drek'TharSuperSword/I revived my old notebook/laptop...

OK, so I borrowed my friend's charger once again, to back up even more data from my old notebook/laptop (well, notebook is technically a laptop). It was really slow, since there were too many apps here and there, but I was be able to successfully back up all the data to my PC.

Then I came with this idea: reinstalling the laptop. I have an unused copy of Windows 8.1 Pro here (unused cos my friend gave me that on my 14th birthday for some reason for free, but I hate Windows 8), and decided to give it a try to this laptop. It doesn't have any DVD tray, but I used the Windows 7 USB DVD download tool, which you can get from Microsoft for free, and it works for Windows 8 install disc too, then I used my 4GB flash drive for the bootable USB (I have a 8GB, but it has lots of data), plugged it into my laptop, then installed Windows 8.1.

The installation worked fine, but the drivers were not installed correctly so that it initially runs on 640x480 screen resolution. Looked up for Intel 945GM drivers for Windows 8, and found one on Softpedia. Installed it, and it worked. However, it sets the resolution to 1024x576, which is the laptop's native resolution, and it won't run Metro apps because it's below 1024x768. I found out that there are some registry tweaks to force it to use 1024x768, and it worked. The display seems to be stretched, but Metro apps seem to work fine, so I'm OK with it.

The sound was also missing, installed Realtek HD Audio Driver (which is what this laptop used before the reinstall), and now it works again.

For some reason, the network speed here is really slow, despite the fact that I'm using the same USB tethering method to connect to the Internet.

I wrote this on my laptop, in case if you're wondering, and here is the screenshot of how it looks like.



Laptop specs

 * Intel Atom N270,1.6GHz dual-core, x86-based processor (meaning that it doesn't support 64-bit)
 * Mobile Intel 945GM Express GPU
 * 1GB RAM
 * 160GB Fujitsu HDD
 * Windows 8.1 32-bit

Installed programs

 * Google Chrome
 * WinRAR
 * Office 2013
 * VLC media player
 * uTorrent
 * DAEMON Tools Lite