My brother passed me his old 2011 Win7 starter Notebook some months ago after replacing it with a Chromebook. He had, for the mostpart, removed all his personal files and (although he doesn't remember doing so) taken advantage of the available upgrade to WIN10.
Booting was taking a long time, reminiscent of the days when you felt that you needed to press the power on button before heading out into the workplace, grabbing a coffee and having a chat with colleagues before heading back to see if it was up and running yet.
I had been toying with the idea of replacing the hard drive with an ssd for months, to see if it would make my Win10 experience more pleasurable.
Gathering various bits of information on where I might find and extract the product key, not all of which were fruitful, I finally extracted the key using Regedit.
I replaced the hdd with a similar sized ssd and rebooted the notebook using my WIN10 media installation USB.
First indication of problems was when I wanted to resize to 80GB and create a 2nd partition.
Whilst the box accepted my writing the 8 to start writing the 80000 size I wanted, every time I hit 0 it responded with invalid character.
To cut a long story short, I bypassed the procedure and continued to install without resizing.
It then asked for the Windows Product Code I had extracted but did not have to hand. I was of the impression that I could write it later after installation but was sadly disappointed. I was refused installation until I aborted, rebooted to the old drive and extracted the number to a handy sheet of paper.
I started over, I got as far as inserting the code but found that when trying to type that the characters being shown were nonsensicle. I clicked on a keyboard icon that brought up an onscreen keyboard so that I could type the correct characters.
After managing to insert the first set of digits, I found the box was hidden by the onscreen keyboard, and the only way I saw to verify that the code had been written correctly was to minimise it or close it. Saw no minimise screen control, so I closed it and verified that I was seeing the correct characters. Clicking the onscreen keyboard icon no longer brought forth the onscreen keyboard, so I aborted again, added a usb keyboard and started over.
Again the notebook keyboard failed to give correct characters but the usb worked fine.
Finally Win10 was installed but I had to keep the USB keyboard connected. Device Manager showed everything OK except for a video controller.
Searching the internet the last 2 days brought forth that the keyboard might be fixed by Samsung settings app or even the extended settings app. But I was unable to derive a package name that might be downloaded.
I thought to extract the drivers from the original disk and the official Recovery App that would create a media installation tool purely for this Samsung Notebook. However, that idea was quickly quashed with a response that it could not proceed because "files were missing".
Currently, unless I find a "fix" to allow the keyboard to work correctly, I only see one viable way to put Win10 on the ssd ... and that is by cloning the 2 drives. I was thinking of putting a Linux distro, but if I have this weird problem with Windows, what chance is there that a Linux distro might work. Wandering around with a keyboard in tow is not going to happen.
Anyone have any ideas ? Experience ? Workaround ...
Booting was taking a long time, reminiscent of the days when you felt that you needed to press the power on button before heading out into the workplace, grabbing a coffee and having a chat with colleagues before heading back to see if it was up and running yet.
I had been toying with the idea of replacing the hard drive with an ssd for months, to see if it would make my Win10 experience more pleasurable.
Gathering various bits of information on where I might find and extract the product key, not all of which were fruitful, I finally extracted the key using Regedit.
I replaced the hdd with a similar sized ssd and rebooted the notebook using my WIN10 media installation USB.
First indication of problems was when I wanted to resize to 80GB and create a 2nd partition.
Whilst the box accepted my writing the 8 to start writing the 80000 size I wanted, every time I hit 0 it responded with invalid character.
To cut a long story short, I bypassed the procedure and continued to install without resizing.
It then asked for the Windows Product Code I had extracted but did not have to hand. I was of the impression that I could write it later after installation but was sadly disappointed. I was refused installation until I aborted, rebooted to the old drive and extracted the number to a handy sheet of paper.
I started over, I got as far as inserting the code but found that when trying to type that the characters being shown were nonsensicle. I clicked on a keyboard icon that brought up an onscreen keyboard so that I could type the correct characters.
After managing to insert the first set of digits, I found the box was hidden by the onscreen keyboard, and the only way I saw to verify that the code had been written correctly was to minimise it or close it. Saw no minimise screen control, so I closed it and verified that I was seeing the correct characters. Clicking the onscreen keyboard icon no longer brought forth the onscreen keyboard, so I aborted again, added a usb keyboard and started over.
Again the notebook keyboard failed to give correct characters but the usb worked fine.
Finally Win10 was installed but I had to keep the USB keyboard connected. Device Manager showed everything OK except for a video controller.
Searching the internet the last 2 days brought forth that the keyboard might be fixed by Samsung settings app or even the extended settings app. But I was unable to derive a package name that might be downloaded.
I thought to extract the drivers from the original disk and the official Recovery App that would create a media installation tool purely for this Samsung Notebook. However, that idea was quickly quashed with a response that it could not proceed because "files were missing".
Currently, unless I find a "fix" to allow the keyboard to work correctly, I only see one viable way to put Win10 on the ssd ... and that is by cloning the 2 drives. I was thinking of putting a Linux distro, but if I have this weird problem with Windows, what chance is there that a Linux distro might work. Wandering around with a keyboard in tow is not going to happen.
Anyone have any ideas ? Experience ? Workaround ...
