HP Compaq NX9600 PATA to SSD 120 Gb

I am generally all for salvaging old equipment, however, in this case.. Not so much.

As far as I am aware, you will not find SSD in PATA form factor.

PATA to SATA adapters are available, however, they take space and with laptop PATA drives there is no separate power connector, it is all integrated in one connection on the PATA drive so you would need a breakout adapter to get power for the adapter board and SATA drive.

Your best bet is to reuse the existing 100 GB PATA drive.

As far as putting Win7 on that laptop, you have an uphill battle finding drivers that are going to work. This is a huge problem with HP and MS, HP has removed pretty much all legacy drivers from their official site. MS is not any better since most of the legacy drivers for legacy OS and hardware have been removed or moved to website locations which no longer work correctly.

You might be far better off attempting 8.1 or Win10 but there is no guarantee you will be able to get drivers for the hardware since MS has become very hostile towards older hardware heck even new hardware less than 2-3yrs old sometimes is not supported by MS..

If you have a legit win7 license, you can download a copy of Win10 in ISO format and activate Win10.

Create a bootable USB stick or DVD from that ISO.

To use your Win7 license, you MUST skip the step at the beginning when the install program asks for key. You MUST start the install with no Internet connection also.

You let W10 installer finish, set the Win Updates to deferred (otherwise it will start updating right away).

Once you have W10 desktop, you can connect to Internet, attempt to activate, W10 will error on activation and offer you the option to enter a DIFFERENT KEY.

It is at that point you can now enter the W7 Key.

W10 now will activate with a DIGITAL license.

Be aware, that there many flavors of licenses, W7 Home will only work for W10 HOME, W7 PRO will only activate W10 PRO. Retail license only activate Retail versions, OEM licenses only activate OEM versions..

And by the way, I am currently typing this message using a P4 at 2.8 ghz with XP.. It can be done but you need to use FireFox last known version that supported XP but I would expect in the next few yrs that it will no longer work with most websites..

Gdetrailer wrote:


As far as putting Win7 on that laptop, you have an uphill battle finding drivers that are going to work.

You might be far better off attempting 8.1 or Win10 ..

I had assumed that Win10 would not work with the old motherboard. I may try Win10 and see if the hardware is compatible.

Sometimes Win10 will use built in generic drivers for some hardware which may work OK in many cases.

Video card is one place where this most likely will happen, when that happens with video card you may not have as much resolutions to work with.

USB ports could be an issue depending on what chipset was used on the system board.

I have been able to use drivers for older OS to trick Win10 into getting correct drivers to load. Did that with a commercial HP RP5800 which is not supported directly by Win10. I was able to locate the chipset INF driver files for Win7 and was able to use that INF file to trick Win10 into installing the correct chipset. Without that Chipset driver, I had no USB ports (PC has PS2 keyboard and mouse ports).

Gather up the XP and Win7 drivers for that laptop, if they are a compressed format you WILL need to extract them using an OS OLDER than Win10. Under Win10, the extractor and installer WILL fail to operate (been there, done that).

So, you will most definitely want to get, extract the older OS drivers on a scratch PC with an older OS than W10.

The key here is getting down to the INF files.. The INF files are nothing more than a simple text file but in that file it tells Windows the name of the device AND what driver file to use.

Even if you decide to try W7, you WILL need to do the same thing for anything you have, MS stripped out a lot of drivers out of W7 and W7 relied on accessing the missing drivers on MS own Windows update site.. The site for Win7 drivers has been moved to a archived legacy site and you may or may not find the drivers you will need.

The biggest issue I have run into on the MS legacy drivers site is the drivers contained on that site attempt to contact the ORIGINAL location which no longer exists. Pretty much getting you back to no drivers exist..

I have run into this with Win7 and printers.. I got lucky for a all in one printer/scanner that I had a driver disc that stopped at XP, pointed Win7 to the INF file on the disc and walla, now had a working printer..

Sadly, it is very rare nowdays to get a driver disc, everything is done online or a download from online and support is non existent.

If you are going to play with old hardware, make sure you save any driver discs for future use..

Rather than spend time and money trying to resurrect an ancient laptop, check out Walmart. They are selling Gateway computers and two models are $199.
Gateway notebooks at Walmart

I recently purchased the 11.6" 2-in-1 notebook. It's quite well made. S Mode is easily disabled. Specs are:

Windows 10 Home in S Mode
Intel® Celeron® Processor N3350 (1.1 GHz, Up to 2.4GHz, 2M Cache)
11.6” LCD IPS Touchscreen Display, (1920 x 1080)
Tuned by THX™ Audio
64 GB eMMC Storage
4 GB LPDDR4 RAM
0.3MP Front-Facing Camera
Up to 8.5 hours of battery life
Micro SD Slot (Up to 512 GB) x 1
Mini HDMI Output x 1
USB 2.0 x 1
USB 3.0 x 1
Built-in Stereo Speakers x 2
Bluetooth 4.0
Built-in Microphone
Product Dimensions: 11.1” x 7.6” x 0.7”
Weight: 2.6 lbs.

Gdetrailer wrote:
I am generally all for salvaging old equipment, however, in this case.. Not so much.

As far as I am aware, you will not find SSD in PATA form factor.

PATA to SATA adapters are available, however, they take space and with laptop PATA drives there is no separate power connector, it is all integrated in one connection on the PATA drive so you would need a breakout adapter to get power for the adapter board and SATA drive.
.
.
.

Having been inside several different laptops of different vintages ...

EVERYTHING HE SAID !

Kiss your C-note good bye.

Tom_M wrote:
Rather than spend time and money trying to resurrect an ancient laptop, check out Walmart. They are selling Gateway computers and two models are $199.
Gateway notebooks at Walmart

I recently purchased the 11.6" 2-in-1 notebook. It's quite well made. S Mode is easily disabled. Specs are:

Windows 10 Home in S Mode
Intel® Celeron® Processor N3350 (1.1 GHz, Up to 2.4GHz, 2M Cache)
11.6” LCD IPS Touchscreen Display, (1920 x 1080)
Tuned by THX™ Audio
64 GB eMMC Storage
4 GB LPDDR4 RAM
0.3MP Front-Facing Camera
Up to 8.5 hours of battery life
Micro SD Slot (Up to 512 GB) x 1
Mini HDMI Output x 1
USB 2.0 x 1
USB 3.0 x 1
Built-in Stereo Speakers x 2
Bluetooth 4.0
Built-in Microphone
Product Dimensions: 11.1” x 7.6” x 0.7”
Weight: 2.6 lbs.

Celeron.. YUCK, that old P4 will run circles around those laptop Celerons.

64 Gig of non upgradable storage, nope, non starter, especially when you factor in MS's insistence of constant 6 month "refresh" upgrades, the first win10 upgrade that gets pushed to this will choke and fail because you do not have enough disk space.

There IS a reason these things are given away, they are junk to start with. OPs old P4 is a better machine to start with..

If you are going to buy a laptop, pass up these cheapies, they are nothing more than a Chrome book knockoff with crippled Win10 OS..

Real laptop with a real HD and processor is going to start around $400.

Ironically, a quick search of Amazon, I have found some 2.5" PATA Laptop SSDs!

HERE is a 128 GB PATA SSD, kind of pricy at $83.

You can get 320 GB spinning rust HERE for $75..

There are also other PATA adapters which will allow the use of Compact flash drives to be subbed in instead (you can get 256 GB or more in CF).

I should note though, SSD or any other solid state flash drive will only speed up the boot time, it will not affect the speed of programs so if the OP wants programs to run faster, this will not help..

as they say it is what it is..

"I should note though, SSD or any other solid state flash drive will only speed up the boot time, it will not affect the speed of programs so if the OP wants programs to run faster, this will not help.. "


Thanks, since the "child" will most often leave the laptop on all the time, I will not make any changes other than add memory to try to install Win 10.

Gdetrailer wrote:
Celeron.. YUCK, that old P4 will run circles around those laptop Celerons.

64 Gig of non upgradable storage, nope, non starter, especially when you factor in MS's insistence of constant 6 month "refresh" upgrades, the first win10 upgrade that gets pushed to this will choke and fail because you do not have enough disk space.

There IS a reason these things are given away, they are junk to start with. OPs old P4 is a better machine to start with..

If you are going to buy a laptop, pass up these cheapies, they are nothing more than a Chrome book knockoff with crippled Win10 OS..

I have a 4 year old NextBook 2-in-1 that I purchased at Walmart for $100. It came with Windows 8.1 that I upgraded to Win 10. Here are the specs:

CPU: Intel Atom BayTrail-T CR, Quad core/1.8GHz
Operation system: Windows 8.1
RAM: DDR 1GB
Internal Memory: EMMC 32 GB
Interfaces: USB 2.0 / Micro SD (up to 64GB)

I have it mounted on my console and I run Microsoft Streets & Trips and play out music and audio books with it. It has performed flawlessly.

I haven't had a chance to mess with the Gateway much yet, but I am quite impressed. It's more than capable of doing the basic stuff like browsing the internet, email, watching movies and TV shows. Thankfully Gateway doesn't put much bloatware on the system. There are a couple of games and a trial version of Microsoft Office. I did an update which was fairly extensive and it not 'choke'. 64GB of storage is certainly limiting, but for normal use it's adequate. The OS takes up 32GB. If you need more storage you can add a micro SD card.

I've not read the comments, so this may already be covered? You can get a decent HP or Dell Intel core i5 laptop from biz off-lease for $100. I've done so in the past, the HP notebook I bought was virtually flawless. Generally, they come without HD/SSD for security reasons. Some come with WIN OS license key stickers, though likely WIN 7 at this stage.

I wouldn't even consider using a Pentium based processor PC. Never heard of a PATA SSD, which would be moot as they won't support anywhere near today's SSD speeds. You also get into Bios compatibility issues with old hardware.

You're basically just asking for unnecessary frustrations with trying to upgrade an old Pentium notebook. Not to mention, if you're connecting to the internet, you should not be using any OS not security patch supported. Hackers can gain access to your system through vulnerabilities without any indication that they are doing so. This could give them access to other computers on your home network?

Instead, just buy a WIN 10 license key. You don't need the install disc, as you can download the full WIN 10 image free directly from Microsoft. Using the option to create a bootable USB flash install drive is generally the easiest method.

1492 wrote:
I've not read the comments, so this may already be covered? You can get a decent HP or Dell Intel core i5 laptop from biz off-lease for $100. I've done so in the past, the HP notebook I bought was virtually flawless. Generally, they come without HD/SSD for security reasons. Some come with WIN OS license key stickers, though likely WIN 7 at this stage.

I wouldn't even consider using a Pentium based processor PC. Never heard of a PATA SSD, which would be moot as they won't support anywhere near today's SSD speeds. You also get into Bios compatibility issues with old hardware.

You're basically just asking for unnecessary frustrations with trying to upgrade an old Pentium notebook. Not to mention, if you're connecting to the internet, you should not be using any OS not security patch supported. Hackers can gain access to your system through vulnerabilities without any indication that they are doing so. This could give them access to other computers on your home network?

Instead, just buy a WIN 10 license key. You don't need the install disc, as you can download the full WIN 10 image free directly from Microsoft. Using the option to create a bootable USB flash install drive is generally the easiest method.

OP doesn't need to buy a Win10 license since they already have a Win7 license key..

The Win7 can be used to activate a Win10 install from scratch, the trick is to skip the step of entering a license key at the beginning of the install. Instead you allow Win10 to install without any Internet connection and allow the install to complete.

Once install has completed, you connect PC to Internet, then manually activate. Activation will error out and offer you the option to enter a license key. It is at this point you enter the Win7 license key and allow activation. Win10 will now return activated with a Digital license.

That's it, it does work, I recently did this within the last couple of weeks so it still works.

OP has all the items they need so why not give it a try, they have nothing to lose other than a couple of hrs playing around.. If it isn't satisfactory, they always have the option to return the PC back to XP or Linux or even give it to Goodwill or any tech recycler..

I see no harm in trying, I would agree that for most modern software there will be some speed downsides but in reality, OP is giving it to a kid and spending on age, doesn't need all that much speed. Heck even with XP, they could install Open Office or Libra Office, the last version of Firefox and have most basics covered..

I have done the same thing with my own hand me down PCs, it wasn't until my DD was entering College when I bought her a real serious fire breathing i7 quad core 2 in 1 laptop and put in a 1TB SSD with Win10 Pro customized heavily to stop Updates for OS stability so I wasn't spending the rest of my life fixing MS botched updates. Yes, that laptop cost $1500 but I wanted to get her one that would be sufficient hardware to outlast her College days. So far 3 yrs in and I have not had any complaints from my DD..