Hard Drive replacement with SSD - How to remove bottom cover

[DeCommissaris]

I find my new laptop is unbearably slow booting up - 3-4 minutes bedore I can send an email in outlook, 100% disk activity without additional software installed. Aside from the bundled crapware and HP software calling home, I think an SSD would improve the situation, If not, back it goes.

It is obvious that a series of screws have o be removed but the bottom cover still seems to be held along the hinge. Are there hidden screws or is there a trick to removing this? I am presuming there is no 2nd drive slot as in some earlier 17" HP laptops.

Thanks for any assistance.

[iomare · Accepted solution]

Hi,

OK. Let us first see about removing the bottom cover. If you look on page 24 of service manual you can see the steps to remove the bottom cover. There are screws under the rear rubber strip which need to be removed. You might need to use a plastics tool such as guitar pick to release the back part of base cover and then flip forwards:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05282360

You can also look at these HP videos (click on base enclosure in list on left)

https://h20574.www2.hp.com/Media/B3B08CF6-3E56-4CA9-8D99-CD5B8D66F8B9/sag_fru_frameset-en.htm

Now once you remove the base enclosure you can check and see if there is an M2 slot which you could use to place a M2 SataIII SSD. This way you could also keep the larger mechanical drive and use the M2 drive as the boot and application drive. It is important that you check first if the slot is present, as sometimes on models which came without M2 SSD the physical slot is not present. However, most likely it is there. Click on solid state drive in the list on link above to see where the slot is.

If you replace the drive or insert an M2 drive I recommend performing a clean install of Windows 10 by downloading the media creation tool from Microsoft and running to create a bootable drive with Windows 10 on it

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Windows will automatically activate as long as you install the same version (home or pro) which was already on the PC. After installation let Windows 10 completely update and find all the drivers (or most). You can follow this process by going into settings and going to security and updates and click on Verify for updates. After go to device manager and see if there are any drivers missing which you can then download from support page for your PC:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-envy-17-u200-notebook-pc/16851079/model/18269695/drivers

Let me know if you need any further help,

David

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[DeCommissaris]

Thank you for the detailed reply. Is there a recommended procedure to remove the rubber strip? Is it gued or snap-in?

Thanks again

[magnusen]

Thanks for the tip on removing the bottom cover!

Were you able to successfully get a new SSD installed in your HP ENVY 17-u292cl?  I have the exact same model but cannot get the BIOS/UEFI to recognize my bootable USB drive, let alone the SSD.