Richard Langner on Improve Your Front Panels.
on Four Wheel Steering, Always The Option, Never The Defining Feature
If we were buying today, we’d probably pick up a Dell Mini 9 even though it requires an SSD upgrade before it will sleep properly.Īre any of you running OSX as the primary OS on your netbooks? What has your experience been?Ĭontinue reading “Hackit: Are You Running OSX On Your Netbook?” → Posted in HackIt, laptops hacks, Mac Hacks, Netbook Hacks Tagged air, apple, appledifferent, Asus, benchmark, boing boing gadgets, eee pc, g4, hackintosh, macbook, macbook air, msi wind, netbook, obsessable, OsX, osx86 ASUS Eee Pc For $200 In 2009 It shows that the MSI Wind is probably the best case for OSX usability. Boing Boing Gadgets is maintaining an OSX netbook compatibility chart. As a counterpoint, Obsessable posted a video demoing just how slow a first generation Eee PC can be (embedded below). Being so small and inexpensive, you can’t really expect much better. It comes in under the MacBook Air in most cases and they conclude that it performs about as well as a four year old G4. Posted in computer hacks, Repair Hacks Tagged bios, eee pc, netbook, recovery, repair, spi Unbricking With The Help Of ArduinoĪppleDifferent decided to run some benchmarks on their MSI Wind hackintosh to see how it stacked up to real Apple hardware. This also isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone recover an EEE PC from the brink – if you’re looking for an Arduino-based alternative, be sure to check this out. While some motherboard manufacturers have built in secondary BIOS chips to prevent the need for this sort of recovery, it’s nice to know that the process is relatively straightforward, provided you have some basic soldering and Linux skills. Using a few Linux-based flashing tools, he was able to reprogram the chip with a functioning BIOS in short order, saving him from a costly motherboard replacement. He couldn’t program the flash chip in-circuit, so he had to desolder it and deadbugged it onto his programmer. With that information in hand, he put together an SPI flash programmer using a breadboard and a DLP-USB1232H USB to UART module. Instead, he took it apart and did a little investigation to find out what SPI flash chip ASUS used in the netbook.
In most situations, people replace a motherboard when the BIOS is damaged beyond repair, but considering the price of motherboards, especially those built for portable devices, he simply refused to go that route. had an ASUS EEE PC 1000HE netbook on his hands which had succumbed to a corrupted BIOS.
Perhaps he’s relying on the small amount left on the tinned pads of the board?Īfter the break you can see the soldering process and a video of the new processor booting Xandros.Ĭontinue reading “Swapping Out Eee PC BGA Chip For 1.6 GHz Upgrade” → Posted in computer hacks Tagged bga, eee pc, hot air gun, processor, soldering, xandros Recovering A Corrupted EEE PC BIOS It doesn’t look like he added any solder after the cleaning process. After a little cleanup with a cotton swab and some flux he plops in an Intel Pentium M LV 778. He then uses a solder braid and iron to remove extra solder from the footprint. heats the board from the underside until the solder melts and he can pluck off the old chip. This hack pulls it off using just a hot air gun. Not only did upgrade to a 1.6 GHz chip, but he managed to get the computer to boot up with the new hardware in place.īGAs are notoriously hard to solder. But if you want to beef up the processor on your 701 Eee PC this is what you’ll need to go through. Personally we find this Ball-Grid Array chip-swap rather horrifying.