I had a good old Asus EEE 1005HA netbook running Windows 7 just fine, albeit slow. The best way of speed it up was to upgrade it to a SSD. The I/O difference should speed it up considerably as the original disk was a 5400rpm one. The SSD prices are low enough, too.
So I went and bought a small, reasonably priced OCZ Vertex Plush 60GB SSD. The disk replacement process isn’t a very simple one because the disk is buried in the guts of the netbook. See one and two (there are more videos, just google them) and be careful with the connectors as they are really fragile.
I’ve replaced the disk, put everything back together and then booted Windows 8 x86 from an USB stick (the easiest way to burn an ISO to an USB stick is to use Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool). Everything went smooth until Windows finalized the setup. Bam. I’ve got an “Windows couldn’t configure hardware on this device” error (very helpful description, isn’t it). After restart the computer didn’t boot but rather complained about missing boot disk. Huh? That’s odd and when Windows install fails it has to do with hardware issues usually – this time it hinted some sort of problems related to the SSD. Perhaps the problem lies in the Intel Atom CPU or something other on my netbook. Hence I’ve tried installing Windows 7 x86 as I knew it works. Bam. The same error. Changing BIOS settings didn’t help either. Same error over and over again. I’ve also got odd errors during partition management. BTW I’d really like to know which genius at Microsoft thought of requiring the Windows license key before OS is installed (yes, yes, you have to retype it each try you make, very annoying in such cases). Just for fun I tried installing Ubuntu and, surprisingly, I had no problems and everything was really smooth. At this point I was tempted to leave it with Ubuntu but I had other requirements and had to have Windows.
Then I started googling around if somebody experienced similar problem and after a while I’ve come to a forum thread where they mentioned very faulty OCZ Vertex Plus firmware. According to that thread older (than the latest 3.55) firmware versions have fatal issues with Windows. Only the latest and newest 3.55 should work. Coming from HDD world I never thought that a disk firmware could create such havoc but it fitted the description of my problems. Note that there is no easy way to check the disk’s firmware version without the OS installed (and even then). Anyway, there is an ISO you have to burn to a CD and boot computer from there (beforehand make sure the SSD is in IDE, not AHCI mode). The ISO is linux based and you’d need an utility to burn it to USB stick (netbooks don’t have CD drives usually). Free UNetbootin does the work just fine.
Once I’ve booted from firmware upgrade USB stick I discovered that my SSD was running firmware version 3.50. Bingo. Update went smoothly and after yet another Windows 8 reinstall everything worked as it should.