Turning a Thin Laptop into a slick Windows 8 machine

I do a lot of work with Zero clients and Thin Clients in my line of work. The manufacturer are great to work with, interaction is good and I’ve had great collaboration from a lot of them in the last 3+ years.

I’ve come across a lot of devices and I wanted to share with you a recent hack I did (hack in the old sense of the term (one of the Wikipedia definition: The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s)

I was using a Wyse Thin client X90mw (http://www.wyse.com/products/cloud-clients/mobile-clients/X90mw) and it was working great for applications like IE and connecting to a View desktop.

I then opened up the cover to take a look at the inside of that machine and I got a surprise, the internal storage memory was connected to a regular eSATA connector, like any regular laptop.

There was also a few small metal weights, to make it heavier on purpose (not sure why…)

So, I removed the internal storage memory and added my own 2.5′ 120gigs SSD hard drive.

I then removed the memory in place and put in 2 * 8 gigs memory SDIMM, memory is cheap now, it wasn’t worth it to stay at 4 gigs, I bumped it up to 16 gigs for 70$.

The hard drive cost was also about 80$, so for 150$, I had all the additional hardware I needed to have a pretty solid laptop that I can use to install a full blown operating system.

Last step is pretty easy, just install any Windows OS you like and you’re up and running. For me, it was an easy way to try out Windows 8 without impacting my production machine and get use to the new UI (I know, a lot of you will say it’s not possible). I learned to like the new UI, once you learned a lot of the shortcut keys, I was able to be almost as efficient with the new UI as I was with WinXP and Win7. You need to go there, read this link and take the time to learn the shortcuts (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows-8/keyboard-shortcuts).

Final screen, Windows 8 deployed on the Thin Laptop, very fast andv very slick.