An interesting hack for those who have problems with the Eee PC’s keyboard responsiveness. From the eeuser forum.
1- Remove your keyboard by pressing towards the screen the three thin metal staples that you can see right over the F1, F6 and F12 keys. You should be then able to remove the keyboard by picking it up from its upper side and letting it shifting towards the screen.
2 – Use a roll of masking tape (the kind of adhesive tape used in house painting) to cover the keyboard back side with 2 or 3 strips.
3 – Put the keyboard back in its place, making sure the three metal fastener will block it correctly.
Warning: covering the back side of your keyboard might interfere with the cooling of your Eee PC.
Via ASUS Eee News.
Personally, I’d love to try this, but I don’t want to overheat my trusty Eee. Who has tried this?
Both run on the Dothan chipset: the 1000HD with Pentium-M and the 904HD on Celeron-M. Both are marketed with 5-hour battery uptimes, though, so it seems fair enough, given they’re not using Atom chips on these new EeePCs.
[via koobten]
Asus Philippines has launched a promo whereby every purchase of an EeePC 701 gives the buyer a chance to win a trip to Hongkong Disneyland and a Hongkong tour.
ASUS gives you the chance to experience just how mobile the Eee PC is—not only in the comforts of your own home, school or office—but in a whole new country. Not alone either—but with your entire family.
Enjoy a Disneyland Package for 3 days and 2 nights, inclusive of roundtrip tickets from Manila–Hong Kong via Cathay Pacific, hotel accommodations, a whole day Disney tour, and a half-day city tour for you and your family!
Get a chance to be one of eight (8) lucky families of four (4) vacationing in Hong Kong by simply purchasing an Eee PC 701 2g or 4g models between July 22 to August 15, 2008 and send the important details like name, address, signature, and contact information on a sheet of paper, along with a photocopy of the sales invoice, billing statement or delivery receipt and a cut out portion of the box where the serial number is indicated (Customers can only send in one entry per sales invoice, billing statement, or delivery receipt.100 models on one receipt, for example, is considered to be one entry). Place entries in an envelope and sending it to 14 United St., Bo. Kapitolyo, Pasig City, 1603 before the draw date of August 20, 2008.
This contest is open to buyers in the Philippines. For more information, you can get in touch with Asus Philippines at (632) 738-0398 or 631-4715.
I wonder why they have not included the EeEPC 900 in this promo. Perhaps they intend to move the first-generation EeePCs faster. But the price drop of the EeePC 70x would perhaps be a big selling point (the 4G sells for about PhP 16,000 or approximately $350). With competition from the new Acer Aspire one (which sells for PhP 18,800 or $418) Asus has reason to be aggressive in marketing.
Here’s one thing that will give Asus a big edge: The EeePC 901. There are a handful of netbooks being launched this time of the year. But so far, in my opinion, the big advantage that the Asus EeePC 901 has over its contemporaries is its battery life. With the default setup (6-cell battery pack), the 901 can last up to 8 hours. Most others will only go up to 3 to 4 hours with the standard/default setups. With extended battery packs, other brands (like the Acer Aspire one) can go up to 7 hours, but in some markets (like the Philippines) these other netbooks are sold with the smaller battery packs.
At any rate, Asus is still the trailblazer in the netbook industry, I would say. I hope they come up with more innovative gadgets.
If eeepc.net has it right, Asus Philippines will not be releasing the much-anticipated (from my point of view) EeePC 901 here. I guess I’ll have to either import one or look for grey-market sellers. The price difference between the 901 and the 900 is reportedly small, which makes the 901 definitely a better buy because of the longer battery life.
Anyway, this August, Dell will be launching their E series, with an attractive entry price point of $299. Maybe that’s even a better buy than the Acer Aspire one (currently selling locally here in the Philippines for PhP 18,800 or approximately $417).
Since the dawn of the Eee, there have been a ton of netbooks launched by other brands, like the HP Mini Note, Asus Aspire one, MSI Wind. And from reviews I’ve read, a lot are praising the WIND for its value, the Aspire one for its low price, and the Mini Note for its sexy looks. Of course, the Eee 901 gets its praise for its long battery life, too (at the default configuration), at about 6-8 hours.
But what I really like about having an Eee is the community. Won’t you think so, too?
Judging from how active the EeeUser forum is, the community love that the Eee has can’t be beat. I guess that’s one advantage of the Eee’s being the first of its kind. It did break barriers. And the community support just grew and grew.
These are real-world tests. I didn’t use any burning software, but instead did my usual day-to-day work, which involves Gmail, reading via my feedreader (Bloglines Beta), reading up various blogs, and also posting on blogs. And as such, being a real-world test, this involved some pauses in between for bathroom breaks, snacks, and such. And so you would notice a few minutes of “sleep” time in between, where I would close the Eee’s lid to save power.
This was done on an EeePC 900 12GB running (the OEM) Windows XP, updated to SP3. Brightness was at 30%, with WiFi on and audio muted. Note that I had turned off wired LAN in my BIOS, since I didn’t need to get wired, anyway. Camera was also turned off via EeePC tray utility.
Battery is the stock 4-cell battery rated at 7.2V, 5800 mAh.
Here are the results:
2:39 p.m. – Cold boot. Windows usually takes about 30 seconds to launch and another 25 seconds until SSD reads stop.
2:46 p.m. – Sleep. Sudden torrential downpour. And we have laundry hanging outside. And so I had to run out to bring the clothes under cover. Sigh. That’s working at home for you!
Uptime: 7 minutes.
2:59 p.m. – Wake up. Back to work. Am at my desk now, so I’m actually working on my bigger laptop at the same time.
3:31 p.m. – Auto sleep. Read a pretty long email on the bigger laptop, so I somehow left the Eee idle for 5 minuets–which is the idle time I’ve set Windows power management to put the machine to sleep.
Uptime: 32 minutes.
3:39 p.m. – Wake up. It’s a battery test, after all, so I’ve turned the Eee back on again to do some reading up on relevant forums.
4:37 p.m. – Sleep. The Eee actually spent another 5 minutse idle. Damn those long emails.
Uptime: 58 minutes
4:39 – Wake up. 5:55 p.m. – Sleep. No more rain. Brought clothes back out. Not that there’s any sunlight to help dry them faster, but it’s something one has to do.
Uptime: 76 minutes.
6:06 p.m. – Wake up. Battery meter is saying I only have less than an hour left.
6:23 p.m. – Battery LED is flashing LED.
6:32 p.m. – Windows is giving the critical battery alert. I figure I could still do a post, and I publish an article I’ve been writing on Blogging Pro.
6:39 p.m. – Power down.
Uptime: 33 minutes.
And so adding all those uptime minutes, we come to a round sum of 206 minutes. This translates to 3 hours and 26 minutes or roughly 3 and a half hours.
Strangely, that’s exactly how long BatStats estimated the 5800 mAH Asus battery to last.
As reported on the EeeUser forum, the EeePC 900 is somewhat picky with RAM upgrades. If the RAM chip is not exactly spec’d like the stock RAM module, then the computer would be prone to freezing, especially when switching between battery and mains power.
And so I tried upgrading my EeePC 900 with a 2GB Kingston memory chip that I currently use on my Compaq B1200. It’s a PC2-5300 CL5 200-pin SODIMM with part number 9905295-052.AH0LF and serial number 900FE501.
I booted up fine on battery power, but when I plugged in the mains adaptor the screen garbled up.
I next tried an Apacer 1GB module with part number CS.01G2A.C00 thinking that it was supposed to be similar (it’s 1GB, after all). The system boots up fine both on battery and mains power. But when you switch from battery to mains, the system just freezes.
And then lastly I tried a Kingston 1GB module with part number 9905295-015.A00LF, and it’s the same with the Apacer chip.
The issue seems to be with running on “high performance mode,” which essentially means at a clock speed of 900 MHz. The EeePC 900 clocks down to 630 MHz when running on battery, to extend battery life. The system then goes back up to 900 MHz when plugged in, so the system is faster. This is with latter BIOS versions. In the earlier BIOS releases, the change is not dynamic. You have to select either power saving or high performance option in the BIOS, and the speed is static at either 630 MHz or 900 MHz.
Note that all of these above RAM modules worked fine on my 701.
Also, note that the RAM module that came with the EeePC 900 is an AData PC2-3200 (running at 400 MHz) with part number DOGC1A08342. I find it strange that the chip is a 400 MHz one. Even the original 512MB chip that came with my EeePC 701 was a 667 MHz one!
This means if you plan to upgrade your 900’s RAM, better make sure the module is compatible!
One of the things I miss in eeeXubuntu (or practically any Linux distro that uses KDE, GNOME or other similar desktop environments) is how I can move windows by just holding the alt button while dragging the window from any grab point. On Windows, you have to drag the window by its title bar in order to move it from one place to another.
This can be problematic with low-resolution screens like that of the Eee (particularly the 7-inch ones). There can be cases where Windows are non-scrolling, and you have to press confirmation buttons at the bottom. But there’s no way of accessing those buttons except for moving the window such that the top part is off-screen.
Fortunately, there are a handful of hacks, and the two easier ones are detailed on howtogeek.com: either the AutoHotKey tool or Win32WM.
Both these scripts will let you resize just by holding down the alt key and grabbing the window from anywhere. You can customize AutoHotKey via script, while Win32WM offers customization via dialog box.
A thread on the EeeUser forum details how some (or most?) EeePC 900 units drain battery even when turned off.
I was just wondering if anyone else has been having this same problem. Now when my eee pc 900 is fully charged and i leave it for a couple of days not using it the battery still drains when even not in use.
And I agree that this is a serious reliability issue. For many people, the Eee serves as a mobile work machine, and for some, as a travel companion. Some just turn on their Eee for a few minutes to check on email and read news, and then off again. But if you lose 10% to 20% of your charge each day then you’d have to plug it in often, which beats the purpose of having a portable computer with a three-plus hours battery life.
I have yet to test this on my machine, but I’m curious to know how Asus will deal with this. Is this perhaps just a BIOS issue? Or is this a battery issue?
And so I’ve convinced myself to switch to Windows XP on my wife and kids can use it. They’re not Linux users, after all. (My 5- and 3-year old kids aren’t used to Windows, but they’re comfortable with OS X Tiger on their Mac Mini. But that’s another story.).
I was thinking of installing XP from scratch using a retail copy, but then I would have to optimize, customize and lighten the installation using the steps Asus had outlined in the 701 user manual. So I thought of just installing the copy that came with the Asus EeePC 900, since that seems to have been tweaked by Asus already.
And it does work. Since the EeePC 900 essentially has a 4GB SSD for its primary storage, the recovery DVD will restore the contents to the 701’s 4GB SSD just fine. It took me about 45 minutes for the recovery, plus some tweaks. The only things that that I had to change were the driver for the touchpad (the 900 uses Elantech, while the 701 uses a Synaptic touchpad), and the webcam.
Otherwise, all worked without a hitch.
Now as for apps, some of the 900’s programs were installed on d:\Program Files by default. So what I did was install these on a 4GB SDHC, which serves as my more or less permanent D: drive for that machine.
