HP Mini (110-1134CL): SSD Upgrade

Installing Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 LTS on this ~10 year old netbook resulted in a very sluggish computing experience. Since it was not a speed demon even when new ten years ago, I doubt its performance was only held back by its old school spinner platter hard drive. As a quick experiment, I'll perform a SSD upgrade and see how much of an performance improvement it would result.

Opening the door at the bottom revealed a memory module as expected. It appears to be a DDR2 memory module with a capacity of 1 GB. Unfortunately I don't have any DDR2 laptop memory modules to attempt a memory upgrade, so I left it alone and continued trying to open the laptop.

There are clips around the perimeter. Trying to open them up, I find resistance at the corners due to screws hidden underneath each rubber feet.

Removing them did not help release the top and bottom halves of the machine, so there are even more fasteners I have yet to see. Looking for what I might have missed, I found three screws with a keyboard icon inside the battery compartment.

Removing those screws allowed the keyboard to be popped open, exposing the hard drive plus additional fasteners holding the laptop together. The focus at the moment is the SSD upgrade, so I'll hold off on further disassembly for now.

The bright piece of metal had the right shape and size for a hard drive cage, and it was also conveniently labeled with an instructional diagram. I thought that was great -- it's going to be as easy as 1, 2, 3! Except it wasn't. For reasons I don't understand, they neglected to mention two more screws that had to be removed before I could proceed with steps 2 and 3.

Once removed, the stock hard drive was held to this cage with four standard mounting screws. From there it was straightforward to install a 2.5" SATA SSD for further adventures in netbook computing.