10 June 2010

Mini MacBook 311 Will Be Back With Me Soon!

Update: Too bad, it'll have to be next week that I get back my Mini 311 :(
At 12:50pm today, June 10, 2010, I got a call from the shop where I brought my HP Mini 311 to for repair.
miage from city-data
They just wanted to inform me that my Mini 311's hard drive would have to be reformatted before I could get it back as part of routine procedure for repairs that had required part replacement.

I remember painstakingly extracting my netbook's hard drive, transplanting it temporarily to my MSI Wind so I could install Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx in there, then shoving it back inside the 311 before going down the local store to claim my 1 year warranty. But when the rep uttered the word "reformat",  I hardly feigned sounding distraught over the news because of sheer relief and excitement at the prospect of having the 311 back in my arms again.

Remember that I had to play the innocent damsel in distress least they discover I was entirely responsible for the damage and charge me for the servicing instead of charging everything against the warranty. In fact, I think I did a very good job of playing that role except that I may have gone too far even for my own taste as I summarized my predicament with the HP Mini 311 as:
I was just playing farmville on Facebook on it last Sunday and then the next morning, Monday, I switched it on and nothing; just blank screen.
FYI, I strongly detest Farmville and have been spending less and less time on Facebook recently but I had to pretend I was 100% "frou frou" and absolutely clueless when it came to computers, much less hold a screw driver to crack a netbook open, thus voiding the warranty. But had I known that strategy alone was enough, that they weren't gonna check what OS was installed in the drive, I should've just skipped the drive transplant part altogether.

But all's well that ends well, I'm relieved. And so after 1 excruciating month of waiting and calling the store periodically for updates - on one occasion, I was told that they were waiting for the part replacement to arrive from Malaysia where they had to order it - I could finally take my HP Mini 311 back home. To be more exact, if the HP service center is able to accomplish the procedural formatting of the hard drive and they get to deliver it at the mall store branch where I checked in my Mini 311 for repair request tomorrow, I should be able to get my netbook back within this week.

I certainly hope I can pick it up tomorrow or else it'll have to be Tuesday next week because Monday is a holiday and I don't plan to go anywhere but catch up with sleep (yes, I'm no longer tinkering that much with OSx86 stuff, but I still find myself staying up late somehow).

Also, I really wish to have my 311 with me over this weekend as this is that last one that I'll have free for another 4-5 months; my MA classes start June 19. I hope to be able to set it up again with Snow Leopard and all. The Mini 311 (hackintoshed of course) will be my primary machine for school. Plus I'm really getting fed up with the agonizingly minuscule 1024x600 screen of the HP Mini 1000.

Would I still want to overclock it? Sure. At least now I already know and have tested that 1.8 GHz works fine, I'll stick with that. :D

4 comments:

Unknown said...

At what ghz did you brick your mini at? I have osx on my mini too no windows. You should make an overclocking for mini's with osx only guide :)

Unknown said...

@Andrew: to overclock your mini, you just need to update the BIOS and change a couple of settings.
Here is my recollection of the steps I followed.

Step1:
Update the BIOS:
1. Download http://icelord.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/3651F14.zip
2. On a clean USB Flash Drive is formatted FAT16 or FAT32, copy original 3651F140.fd file, and rename it to 3651.BIN
2. Disconnect power suply and remove the battery
3. Press and hold Win and B keys
4. Connect the power supply and press the power button
5. release the Win and B keys after 3-5 seconds
6. recovery process will begin to load the BIOS image in memory
7. after few seconds computer start beeping every 2 seconds - a process of flash BIOS
8. computer shuts down automatically after flashing done

Step2:
Here are the BIOS settings I am using, bringing the mini at 2Ghz:
System Clock Mode = Unlinked
FSB Clock = 512 + 160 ( 2GHz CPU)
Memory Clock = 1024+42 (1066)

LeMaurien19 said...

@Andrew
I bricked it at 2.2 GHz.
2.2Ghz | 220Mhz | 880 | 768+112 | 3:2 | 1320
2GHz could work, I'd imagine but I wasn't able to complete booting up OS X (it would freeze) and that was the precise reason why I tried to go higher.

I thought, quite stupidly, that pumping the clock higher would help me complete OS X boot up.

So, NO, it was NOT because I was greedy and wanted a higher clock.By the time I tried for 2.2 GHz, it was no longer the clockspeed I was concerned of, but how to resolve freeze during boot up ;)

Also, Atom N280 is less resilient than Atom N270 in terms of overclocking.

Anonymous said...

hahaha, support technicians are so "techie" gullible, thinking they know it all. Most people who work at service centers (whom i know) know nothing more than windows. shove em a machine running on a linux or bsd kernel and missing wireless driver they'd squint at the kde/gnome interface and then bring out their windows installer cd's. I'll bet those guys don't even know how to install windows via a memory card.
You made my day, you wrench wench.