Hacking Asus EEE

An anonymous reader writes "Torsten Lyngaas has published a set of instructions with photographs on his personal wiki that describe the steps he took to install $450 worth of extra hardware, including a GPS receiver, an FM transmitter, Bluetooth, extra USB ports, 802.11n, and an extra 4GB flash storage drive."

Corel Cache?

[Razed By TV]

There are something like 92 pictures on that page. I don't think his personal wiki is going to be able to survive the onslaught of /. readers. May want to corel cache that next time.

http://beta.ivancover.com.nyud.net:8090/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upgrades [nyud.net]

Hopefully it gets all of the pictures.

Re:Available in the 2nd quarter

[tomkost]

I bought 3 last week. look on pricegrabber.

Re:RAM vs. battery life?

[glop]

Actually, I have read some pretty interesting stuff on the eeeuser.com forums.
They notably explained that when in sleep mode the RAM is refreshed normally (i.e. not with a special low power technique) and uses 2W.

This forces me to turn my EEE off to avoid running out of battery after a day or an night of sleep mode.

I did not see if the 2GB stick made things worse or not... Maybe there is more about this in the eeeuser.com forums.

 

Re:Honest question

[evilviper]

I would love to see (and willing to pay extra) if for starters standardization appears for laptop batteries and power bricks.

What isn't standardized about batteries and power bricks?

I've got 3 power bricks from different laptops, and they're all almost identical (+/- 1V DC) and power my current laptops just fine. There are a few manufacturers that insist on funky connectors from time to time, but clearly you're happily buying from them despite this, so it must not matter to you as much as you say it does, otherwise you'd only buy the standard units.

Why do I have AAA / AA / C / D cells for my transistor radios and flashlights, but not the same thing for my laptop.

You might notice that you DON'T have Li-Ion AAA/AA/C/D cells... They're too tricky to just have loose cells, and hope users don't do anything stupid with them.

And laptops batteries ARE pretty well standardized, too, though not like you are thinking... If you crack open the casing on two different laptop batteries, you'll see that, though they may be in a different arrangement, and possibly a different number of them, the cells are both physically and electronically identical (give or take a few mAHs depending on age). You can't just swap batteries between laptops, as form factors differ, but if you could, you'd find that feature to be less than desirable, anyhow. It does allow, however, for numerous 3rd parties to compete easily for sales of OEM and after-market batteries, cheaply.

Re:Honest question

[Anonymous Coward]

This [wikipedia.org] may explain the "backwards" agp slot without resorting to conspiracy theories.

Re:Honest question

[oakgrove]

The link you provided is a Google search for lithium batteries. Not lithium-ion batteries like the ones generally used in laptops, cell-phones, etc.

There are several important differences. The practical difference between Lithium batteries and Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries is that most Lithium batteries are not rechargeable but Li-ion batteries are rechargeable. From a chemical standpoint Lithium batteries use lithium in its pure metallic form. Li-ion batteries use lithium compounds which are much more stable than the elemental lithium used in lithium batteries. A lithium battery should never be recharged while lithium-ion batteries are designed to be recharged hundreds of times.

Lithium ion batteries are not available in standard cells sizes (AA, C and D) like lithium batteries are.

This post was shamelessly ripped from here. [greenbatteries.com]