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.
According to this BBC News article, Gartner analyst Steve Prentice predicts the mouse will be dead within five years. He claims that multi-touch interfaces (such as those on some modern smartphones including the OpenMoko and the iPhone) and three-dimensional controllers will eventually take over from the mouse’s position as the de facto dimensional pointing device for modern computing system.
However, I’m a little sceptical, and there’s a simple reason for this: the problem of familiarity. Many people refuse to use new concepts simply because they’re unfamiliar with them. This is why the QWERTY keyboard layout persists to this day, despite the fact that some people find the Dvorak Simplified layout to be more efficient. It’s because people simply prefer the layout they’re familiar with. (With regards to this, I find the QWERTY layout to be more efficient, personally, because I find it’s easier to perch four fingers on ‘ASDF’ than to perch fingers and thumbs on ‘AOEUI’.)
The problem is that the computer environment is still largely 2D environment. We still only generally go left and right and up and down - this is largely due to the constraint of working on a 2D screen. Although touch displays are becoming more common, they generally lack an ability to perform a secondary or teritary click, and people may find it more ergonomic to use a mouse than to reach across their desk to touch their computer screen.
That said, 3D interfaces are becoming more common. Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup system has a beautiful 3D interface, and Windows Vista’s new task switcher, Flip 3D, also uses a 3D interface. Accellerometer mice are becoming more common (hardhack sites are overflowing with howtos) and this makes it quite possible that 3D mice could be common within the next decade or so. With this in mind, I think it’s quite likely that to use Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.12 “Snagglepuss” released in 2017, you could lift the mouse from the desk, hold it vertically parallel to the screen, and hurl it forwards or backwards to browse backups from the past.
Here’s this week’s weekly news round-up, and we begin with a continuation of Crackergate from last week. The Republican National Convention, which will be held in the Xcel Center, across the road from the Science Museum of Minnesota, has stepped up security, including the ludicrous step of getting the Science Museum to close to the public. Do they expect mutant scientists to emerge from the museum with octopus armies and test-tube cannons? If so, then Jeremy Clarkson’s claim that, in some parts of America, some people must have started mating with vegetables might well turn out to be true.
In technology news, E3 was this week, and there’s been the typical fest of corporate cock-waving that usually takes place at these conferences. There was an unfortunate incident where the soul singer Duffy was asked by confused journalists about the company strategy and corporate characteristics of a company whose product she was promoting - whoops…
In the world of chip-making, AMD has found a ten-pound note on the road, and has decided to spend it making more Phenoms (the high-end triple- and quad-core processors) and launching a new mobile platform to compete with the Centrino. It’s called the Turion X2 64 Ultra, and I can’t really think what else to say. And AMD wonder why they’re making losses. Intel, on the other hand, is doing quite well with profits up 25%.
Borgsoft hasn’t been doing too well either.
In the metablogosphere, WordPress 2.6 has been released. It includes a host of new features, such as the fixing of several bugs in the admin panel, and a new version control feature called Post Revisions.
In politics, it turns out the MoD has lost over 100 USB flash disks, some of which had sensitive data on them. This is getting quite silly now. And the Government has claimed it hasn’t made a decision yet on whether or not it will change its own borrowing rules. Overall, a bit of a fiasco, then.
In other news, the latest edition of Simon’s Cat has appeared online, having been premiered on The Culture Show on BBC Two on Tuesday. Keeping in with this theme, some lolcats have wormed their way into this site lately, so I shall now go hunting for them and put them somewhere else.
Last week, I found myself with three evaluation machines and no way to compare their performance out of the box. Oh, dear.
I could have used Sysmark or 3DMark. However, there are problems with these:
I needed something quick and dirty. So I wrote Seat Graffiti. It’s a little piece of software, written in C, which does some basic benchmarking tests. And, just because I’m kind, it’s open-source and in the public domain.
Here’s its webpage. I’ll update it with new releases when I can be bothered, which probably won’t be very often. And there’s several caveats and missing features, but at least it’s free.
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.
I’m typing this on an emulated XO laptop. True, I have to run it under QEMU on the most powerful machine I own, and I had to switch to Code view to type this, and my 1024*768 website renders horribly in it, but the interface is so pleasant to use, and they’ve put such effort into it. That’s what the children in developing countries will be getting. It is simply wonderful to use.
Whoever devised the Sugar interface should be awarded a knighthood for their services to computing. And probably the presidency of the United States as well.
My ageing iMac DV has a miniscule (by today’s standards) hard disk - it’s only 12gB. Ridiculous. And even with a fresh install of OS X, it was starting to fill up.
Thus came the computer’s salvation from being squeezed into a puny few megabytes to breathe - the Freecom Data Tank 800gB. Don’t ask me if ‘Data Tank’ is all one word - I don’t know myself.
Either way, the packaging was (as usual) a nightmare, with the disk being squeezed into a tiny amount of space between the cables and disks. However, eventually, it was out.
The disk is quite heavy, but has a surprisingly small footprint. Its casing is aluminium with black plastic on the front and back. There are two buttons on the front to be used with the driver software, and a glowing emblem displaying the drive’s default capacity (800gB) and which flashes on and off when the disk is being accessed.
Inside, there are two 400gB SATA disks working in a RAID array, which then connects to your computer via either USB2 or FireWire 400/800. And, yes, they used the ‘fake gigabyte’ - the true combined value is around 745gB.
Nevertheless, this is still enormous, and the drive works fine without any drivers. I can use software encryption on Mac OS X if I want to, and I have an Automator script which will back up my Users folder every evening.
The power comes from an odd-looking plug coming from the brick which hooks up to the mains supply. It does have the annoying habit of spinning down after not being accessed for five to ten minutes - and it takes around fifteen seconds to spin back up again. It is an annoying, but minor inconvenience.
Far more inconvenient is the stupid software - a rubbish Flash menu, linking you to the Freecom website to download some encryption software. While this menu irritates you, a pretentious and stupid video in the corner declares that ‘IT TOOK MAN TEN MILLION YEARS TO ACCUMULATE 11 EXABYTES OF DATA’. Shut up!
I ended up removing the disk (thank goodness for the eject key on the keyboard) and I intend to ceremoniously burn it on New Year’s Eve. OK, maybe tonight.
One other detail that I do like about the disk is the quietness of it; there is a minor hum from the rotating platters, and that’s it. You have to physically put your ear to the machine to hear the head moving.
Overall, I’m impressed: if you ignore the idiotic software and power-saving scheme, the device is wonderful. Bravo Freecom.
Freecom DataTank 800gB: £155.68
Score: 4.9/5
Contact: Freecom, freecom.com
The Freecom DataTank is available from the Crashed Pips shop, in partnership with amazon.co.uk.
You probably use people’s names many, many times a day without realising it. However, does your computer have a name?
Chances are, it does. When your computer connects to the Internet, it has to give its IP address to the server (the address supplied by the ISP) so that the server knows where to send the information. It looks something like 123.456.789.1 - essentially four numbers separated by dots. Using the current, and most prevalent system on the Internet these numbers will only ever be as high as 255, but IPv6 uses a new type of IP address which uses hexadecimal and is 16 bytes long. This means that there will be more IP addresses than anyone will ever need or want, so the problems with there only being 2554 addresses using IPv4 (the present standard protocol) will be eliminated.
But aside from that, does the computer have a name which you can refer to it by? If you’ve got a home network, each computer is given a separate name to allow it to be identifiable using network shares. And you have to assign those names.
It may be done automatically, but I personally give each machine I have a ‘name’ to distinguish it by. Some of them even answer to it.
The one I’m typing on now is called Welchman, after Gordon Welchman, a cryptologist, mathematician and a pioneer of the bombe, the computer used to help crack the Enigma cipher used by the Nazis during World War II.
Following this, my mobile phone’s named after Nathan Stubblefield, the person who originally patented the wireless telephone in 1908. And the next machine I get will probably be named after Alan Turing, the man who practically invented the modern computer.
That said, some machines have odd names. The machine which this blog was originally conceived and written on was called Istari, after the group of wizards to which Gandalf belongs to in The Lord of the Rings. I’m pretty sure I was once so irritated by the Windows installation process that I just thumped my head on the keyboard to name it ‘hy8r23h89friou’.
In response to CNet’s Top Ten Terrible Tech Products, here I’m listing what I consider to be the five worst technology products of all time.
These horrible, stupid, newbie-ish cameras are so hated that I can’t even find any pictures on the Internet. They’re cheap, tacky, made of blue plastic, look like a gun so you’d get shot if you used one in London, and are generally only used by schools who can’t afford a proper camera with a screen and tape.
The worst problem, however, was with the terrible, Flash-based, n00b-interfaced software. That was the only way to get the camera to talk to a PC (it has something against UNIX) and it was slow, clunky, and generally useless.
I’m not even sure if I’ve got the model number right, but my goodness are they awful. In my experience they only last around 80 days before they fail to power up altogether, before which they produce horrible, smeared prints that might have come out of a medieval scribe’s quill.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I thought the whole point of a portable computer was that it would be a fully functioning computer whether or not you were near a docking station.
The concept was completely pointless - unless you were near a docking station, your computer was crippled. There should already have been a proper set of I/O ports and components on board the machine.
A horrible, newbie-ish Internet provider, which gives headaches to anyone with an ounce of sense in them. It’s tiresome, anti-competitive (its browser blocks rival search engines, Email services etc) and generally rubbish.
Both these products are nothing short of shams. I mean, what idiot had the idea of offering a WMA player in black and… brown? And the Zune isn’t compatible with previous purchases made in Windows Media Player, has restrictive DRM, and can’t even be used as a hard drive.
Then we come to the horror of Windows Vista - Windows, but with added safety tape, bloat and a jazzed-up Explorer. It’s still the same core, though - DLLs, closed kernels, and now with added DRM.
The thing that pees me off most though about Vista and the Zune is that Microsoft seem to have lost the ability to innovate. Most of the much-touted new features in Vista have been in UNIX-like OSes such as Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris for ages. And the Zune seems like the worst part of every MP3 player out there salvaged from the R&D department’s wheelie bin, and glued together into a Windows Live Frankenstein of awfulness.
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