Modded UX490 UMPC Shows Off Years of Community Development 75
Posted
by
timothy
from the soldered-on-a-new-warranty-too dept.
from the soldered-on-a-new-warranty-too dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The community at www.MicroPCTalk.com have spent the last few years devising all sorts of mods and tweaks for the Sony VAIO UX-series UMPC. Now they've thrown nearly all of their major breakthroughs into one machine. Using the latest UX model (UX490) as the base, the original SSD has been swapped for a speedy 128GB SSD, the CPU has been unsoldered from the mobo and replaced with a Core 2 Duo U7700 (making this probably the smallest computer to use said CPU). The original EDGE module has been removed, and carefully put in its place is an E169 Huawei terminal which provides up to 7.2mbps 3G (HSDPA), voice and texting. On top of this, the unit quad-boots Mac OS X, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP (and the Huawei terminal works under Mac OS X as well)."
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
For 5+ boot options, they should be aware of extenden partitions, and the OSes that can boot from them. Apparently, these guys didn't bother.
Re:Hooray for standardized hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
(This is just a somewhat educated guess, any EEs reading this: Please correct me)
A soldered BGA contact point will probably have a greater contact area with better signal quality. Since all of that signalling is done digitally, they can lower the voltage potential between their ones and zeros to the lowest point where they can still reliably be distinguished, and that point ought to be lower with a neatly soldered BGA chip than a socket with it's tiny contact points. Also, including the socket generates cost for the socket, additional CPU packaging and wastes very precious space. Lastly, keeping the cooling system yet upgrading the CPU isn't a smart move if you're not *really* sure your cooling equipment is up to the job. Thus an enthusiast thing.
The 7-vista-XP point (Score:3, Interesting)
If a system can run those, well then running linux is a non-issue.
(since it runs on just about any hardware.)