I’ve been following the ultrasub-notebook market very closely of late. Eee PCs (and MacBook Airs) have been selling like hotcakes, whilst other manufacturers have somewhat failed to penetrate the market.
However, I’ve just come across the HP Mini-Note. (True, that’s a rubbish name, but it’s better than “Eee PC”, or, worse still, “G-DIUM” - what were they on when they thought of that?) And, I have to say, it looks to be a very promising little machine.
Note: This is a copy of the present version of the article available at Jonathan Rothwell’s Brain Dump here. More up-to-date (or incorrect) information may be available there.
The Asus Eee PC is a fabulous little computer. However, it has one big Achilles’ heel: it only has 512mB of RAM by default on the lower-end models. This means that even applications such as Firefox, Evolution and OpenOffice.org can struggle. In most cases, RAM is more of a bottleneck than the CPU clock speed.
The Eee PC accepts up to 2gB of 200-pin SO-DIMM random access memory. (The Eee only uses a 32-bit CPU by default, and therefore can handle a theoretical maximum of 3gB of RAM, but as there’s only one RAM slot on the logic board, it can only handle 2gB without replacing the motherboard and CPU.)
I ordered my RAM from Crucial, who are, I have to say, excellent. The module arrived within sixty hours, along with an anti-static wrist strap. Their pricing is reasonable too.
I highly recommend the anti-static wrist strap. It’s a little strap with an adhesive side that you wrap around your wrist, and a copper tape on the end which is connected to ground. Normally, you’d connect it to the chassis of the computer: but as the Eee’s chassis is plastic, this will not do any good. Anything metal and exposed should work. I connected mine to the pipe of a radiator.
With regards to other tools, you should have access to a small-ish cross-headed (Phillips) screwdriver, and you should also have a large, clean-ish workspace, with access to a suitable grounding device and a spare thirty minutes or so, if you’ve never touched the inside of a machine before. If you have, it’ll probably take less than ten minutes. I swapped mine in less than a quarter of an hour, and the process would have been a lot quicker if I didn’t have to keep stopping to take photographs.
Upgrading the Eee PC’s RAM will most probably void the warranty. On some machines, an additional warranty sticker is stuck over the RAM access panel, so you would void the warranty by opening it. It’s no use coming round the other way either: all Eees have a warranty-void sticker on the spacer plate between the keyboard and the logic board. If you’re using the Eee 4G Surf (i.e. the 4gB disk drive but no webcam), you have no choice but to come down through the keyboard and trackpad, as there is no RAM access panel. On the 2G Surf, don’t bother: the RAM is soldered directly onto the logic board, so you’d have to replace the logic board as well as the RAM - and as the hard drive is soldered onto the motherboard, you’d need to replace that as well. Overall, it might be more economical for you to return the Eee and buy the next model up, if you are desperate for more RAM.
Even if you do not void the warranty, should your Eee fail and you want a refund from Asus, you would have to prove that the fault exists with the original hardware. This means restoring the original RAM module. If you intend on retaining the warranty’s validity, you’ll just have to put up with the RAM how it is.
I can take no responsibility for any damage that arises out of you following the instructions provided here. They are provided in good faith and are correct to the best of my knowledge, but they are provided as is and with absolutely no warranty whatsoever.
Right then… let’s go
This method comes in five parts: preparation, opening the case, installing the RAM, closing the case, and testing. This method should work for the Eee PC 701 4G, 8G, the 900 and the 901. I’m unsure about the 902 onwards, and the 1000 models. The 2G 701 has RAM that is impossible to replace, and the 4G Surf has no RAM access hatch. RAM can still be upgraded in the 4G Surf, but the ‘opening’ procedure should be modified to involve removing the keyboard, trackpad and top part of the case, and lifting the motherboard out of the case to access the RAM. Instructions for this can be found elsewhere on the Internet.
It’s worth grounding yourself again before doing this, just to be safe.
Place the RAM access hatch back where it was, and click it back into position. Replace the two screws, this time screwing clockwise to screw them in.
The Linux distribution that ships with the Eee PC has a kernel which is only compiled to handle 1024mB (1gB) of RAM, downwards. If you have a 2gB module and want to take full advantage of it, you will need to recompile the kernel. Instructions for this can be found elsewhere on the Internet.
Speaking of which, if you’re still using the default distro, why? It may be easier and cleaner for you to install Ubuntu Eee or Eeedora than to use the default, buggy, ugly, messy Xandros distribution.
I’ve just installed bits of Ubuntu Netbook Remix on Hammond (the Eee PC). And my God, is it beautiful. Just look at it! Look at it!
And look at what it looks like when a window is open! Look at it… it’s unbelievably slick!
Note how smoothly the window picker slips into the Firefox window! It’s stunning!
That said, it’s by no means perfect, yet. The installation process is rather messy at the moment, but by the time Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex appears (in October) it should be a painless process. At present, one has to
However, after that, everything appears in the shiny newness you see here. However, there are still a couple of rough edges:
What’s wrong here is that there’s nothing there to stop the icon labels if their text overflows into the space occupied by the icon immediately below. Here’s another caveat:
The problem here is that the scrollbar has badly misplaced itself - outside the box. However, this strangely manages to look artistic, somewhat like one of those silly installations at the Tate Modern.
What you see here is ume-launcher, Canonical’s answer to the default Asus Eee launcher. Personally, I think it beats the Eee launcher hands down.
There’s also the window picker applet at the top, which is specially designed for small screens, and maximus, somethig that maximises every window to make the best use of available screen space.
The reason it all looks so pretty is because of the new system it uses. It’s called Clutter, and uses OpenGL to render truly stunning user interface graphics. Somewhere on the Internet, there is a demo floating about of a GDM theme using Clutter - it looks simply stunning. The animations for ume-launcher are still a bit messy in some places, but my God are they beautiful.
It easily beats the Eee’s ugly default launcher, in my opinion. But there are still a few things I think wouldn’t go amiss in ume-launcher:
Other than these small gripes, I’m finding it difficult to fault, even at this early release. I suspect the final version that will appear with Intrepid will be even more shiny and wonderful.
…and recovered somewhat quickly afterwards.
Here’s an image. Sorry, but Swiftfox decided it wasn’t going to let me thumb this.
So, after just over a week with the Eee PC, I still haven’t reviewed it.
This is partly due to my heavy workload, however, I can give you an update.
The machine has been christened Hammond (guess why) and Eeedora has been swapped for Eeexubuntu, which has had Xfce replaced by GNOME. (I only just got round to switching over the splash screen).
My iMac (Welchman) is now incapable of connecting to the wireless network,
so I’ll either have to buy a wireless bridge or a new Mac. Irritating, I know.
I might be able to write a review of the Eee in the next week, and maybe also a HOWTO make it completely not suck. But that very much depends on my workload, and how far I progress with the new theme.
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