[stammie]

Like I said todays project is to see if I can free up some space,
if it doesn't work there's a 64GB m.2 drive on Amazon for £29.99, I believe 64GB would probably be the sweet spot for Windows to work and function correctly on this box but I'd rather not spend anymore money on it (other than the 12 quid on the sata cable if it shows up), lets see how this slow project goes first

[jmh2002]

I hear what you are saying Stammie, in fact I raised this point earlier in this thread because I had discovered a similar problem when reading online about these HP machines. So I am not at all surprised.

I guess as far as Kodi is concerned, you can take all the normal precautions that owners of low storage devices have been doing for several years (eg: aTV2 owners) to prevent Kodi bloat from thumbnails, packages, etc

[nickr]

An engineer might say that if you have 7GB free the machine is over engineered. You can run an entire kodi system in 8G.

[stammie]

An engineer might say that if you have 7GB free the machine is over engineered. You can run an entire kodi system in 8G.

Yeah you're right but unless you can tell me how to get Now TV, BT Sports and NBC Sports Live Extra running in Linux your point is pretty moot to me.
And before you start replying I know there is a Kodi NBCSLE addon but it is still very much a work in progress and I'd prefer to have a reliable if inferior way to use the service until eracknaphobia perfects his addon

[mtx512]

I'm keen to get one of these boxes although getting hold of the sata cable is putting me off. I noticed that HP do similar cables for their Envy 17 laptop, I'm wondering if it will work as it seems to have the same kind of 10 pin ribbon cable?

[mteam]

Now you've got me thinking

I will be using for kodi (just artwork thumbnails etc for library not the movies) netflix, Skygo and browsing

Would I be better going for the minix box

[Speighty]

I'm keen to get one of these boxes although getting hold of the sata cable is putting me off. I noticed that HP do similar cables for their Envy 17 laptop, I'm wondering if it will work as it seems to have the same kind of 10 pin ribbon cable?

You might be onto something, I might take a punt and try one.

Do we have a picture of the original 260 sata cable and maybe we could compare.

Could always buy one from a uk seller and then send it back if it doesn't work.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Hard-Disk-...51c2dfc0b2

[stammie]

The first picture in post #417 shows the cable, I can't tell from lookimg if they're the same

[noggin]

Looks like they are the same connectors, but the Envy 17 cable is a lot longer, so would need to be folded internally ?

[stammie]

Rather than spending 19 quid on a cable which may or may not work I'm thinking of spending £30 on this m.2 drive to ensure Windows will work as I want it to unless anyone can give me a reason to not buy it.

My starting from scratch experiment resulted in only freeing up a couple of hundred GB,
its a great box but severely limited by the way the SSD is set up, I've worked out deleting all the partitions on this drive and putting on a fresh Win 8.1 Pro 64 bit install would give me 4GB more storage than this 8.1 with Bing abomination has!

[mtx512]

I'm keen to get one of these boxes although getting hold of the sata cable is putting me off. I noticed that HP do similar cables for their Envy 17 laptop, I'm wondering if it will work as it seems to have the same kind of 10 pin ribbon cable?

You might be onto something, I might take a punt and try one.

Do we have a picture of the original 260 sata cable and maybe we could compare.

Could always buy one from a uk seller and then send it back if it doesn't work.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Hard-Disk-...51c2dfc0b2

I spoke with the aliexpress seller who claims the cable should work. The cables do look similar (albeit longer) but it is a punt.

[decpvr]

Rather than spending 19 quid on a cable which may or may not work I'm thinking of spending £30 on this m.2 drive to ensure Windows will work as I want it to unless anyone can give me a reason to not buy it.

Specs wise it looks ok; 42mm long M2 drive. One of the reviews seems rather bad though. It mentions slow speed, malware and chewing up their internet connection! Buyer beware I guess.

They also have a similar model, but with 128Gb for a bit more at £43. Maybe that works out to better value - it's always best to buy more storage than you think you'll need!

Looks like they are the same connectors, but the Envy 17 cable is a lot longer, so would need to be folded internally ?

The original cable from HP is 50mm long. In the description on aliexpress they mention it is available in 180mm & 100mm lengths, you just need to leave a note specifying which kind you want when ordering. Maybe the 100mm length would be more suitable - less folding perhaps?

You might be onto something, I might take a punt and try one.

Do we have a picture of the original 260 sata cable and maybe we could compare.

Could always buy one from a uk seller and then send it back if it doesn't work.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Hard-Disk-...51c2dfc0b2

It looks like the same seller also has another one for £1 less which I think is the 100mm (shorter) cable I mentioned above:

http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.vie...ID=EBAY-GB

[Speighty]

I've gone ahead and taken a gamble and bought the shorter cable for £17.99, I will let people know how I get on once I recieve it.

[nickr]

An engineer might say that if you have 7GB free the machine is over engineered. You can run an entire kodi system in 8G.

Yeah you're right but unless you can tell me how to get Now TV, BT Sports and NBC Sports Live Extra running in Linux your point is pretty moot to me.
And before you start replying I know there is a Kodi NBCSLE addon but it is still very much a work in progress and I'd prefer to have a reliable if inferior way to use the service until eracknaphobia perfects his addon

My point is, what do you think you are going to use your 7G for?

[stammie]

My point is, what do you think you are going to use your 7G for?

Well there's the obvious further Windows updates, I'd also like to install some programs, apps and anti virus,
there's also the need for storage space for page filing with only 2GB RAM.
I'd also like to transfer some of the functions of my main PC to it given its low power consumption.

These are great little boxes especially if you only want to run Kodi on them but as a Windows machine I now wouldn't recommend them unless you're prepared to spend extra on them.
So far my expenditure has been only on the box as I've repurposed things I already had,
given the difficulties of obtaining a sata cable (they may become readily available but I have my doubts that HP will retool to manufacture cables for a machine they are dumping stock onto the market) but I'm now going to buy an SSD that will make it fit for purpose.
Its still a good deal though, £85 for the machine, £43 for a 128GB SSD (I decided to order that rather than the £29 64GB one) and I might well get 2 GB extra RAM for another tenner, all told £138 for a reasonably capable low power consumption Windows machine which is small enough to hide behind my telly .
I don't think I'd want to try and run photoshop or try video transcoding on one though lol