Netbook Hacks

56 Articles

Eee PC Tablet Build

July 7, 2008 by 6 Comments


OCAU member [Bismar] was in the market for an e-book reader, but all of his commercial options were too expensive. He decided to build one himself, and what he came up with is the Tabeee MK1, an e-book reader made from a 7″ Eee PC, a touchscreen, and a custom case.

The project is far from completion, still in the midst of its first objective: building the case. [Bismar] cut an old Lian Li case for the aluminum base, then made sure the motherboard from the Eee fit properly. The next major step was bending and cutting an acrylic sheet to form the exterior of the case. He hit a few snags bending the sheet, but forum members offered some ideas on how to do this effectively. The project is still rolling along, and we’ll be sure to show you the Tabeee MK1 when it is finished.

Eee PC 900 Touchscreen

July 2, 2008 by 3 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wVhW6a9i7Y&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]
Jkkmobile has just posted their touchscreen hack for an Eee PC 900, and it looks great. Installation of this kit is pretty easy, just fit the panel to the screen, connect the controller to the USB lines, close it up, calibrate it, and you’re done. The controller board is placed on top of the WiFi card. Jkkmobile has informed us of touchscreens for older Eee PCs before, but this is one of the first we’ve seen for a 900+ model. The post lists a few sources for touchscreen kits, but no word on which one they used.

MSI Wind Under FCC Review

June 26, 2008 by 12 Comments


Those of us who have been eagerly waiting to get their mitts on an MSI Wind can see some light at the end of the tunnel, as it is currently under review for domestic sale by the FCC. The Wind is MSI’s answer to Asus’s game-changing ultraportable, the Eee PC, and has slightly better specs. It features an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM. It also has built in bluetooth and webcam. Check out a few shots of the Wind’s internal parts at jkkmobile or grab them all from the FCC’s site.

Eee PC 1000H Dissected

June 22, 2008 by 9 Comments


The people at TweakTown completely disassembled a new Eee PC 1000H and documented the entire process. Aside from showing you the side effects of too much tech fetish and not enough regular fetish, the article reveals all the parts of the new Eee, with a few surprises inside. Although it’s an Eee PC, it’s very different from all of its predecessors.

One of the things the teardown shows is that several parts are far more modular than previous Eee PC models. The hard drive, for example, is a standard Seagate Momentus which is made for desktop systems; it can easily be swapped out. Another easily swapped component is the 1GB SIMM from ASint.

Although their (ahem) stripping process was a bit unconventional, a lot of interesting information was yielded from this teardown. Keep ’em coming, TweakTown, just be sure to clean off your tool when you’re done.

[via Gizmodo]

Eee PC 901 Teardown

June 17, 2008 by 5 Comments


The folks from bit-tech have done us a great service by tearing open the Eee PC 901. Under the keyboard is a large metal plate that acts as the processor’s heat sink. The 4GB SSD card is not soldered to the board this time around. There is some empty space labeled IDE3 and solder points that say 3GCard, which definitely deserve further investigation. The oddest thing they found was a button with no indication to its purpose. It looks like a good machine and we hope to see more Eee PC hacks in the future.

[via Engadget]

Making Music With The Eee PC

June 13, 2008 by 10 Comments


Create Digital Music has been watching the Asus Eee PC closely. The laptop’s portable nature and low price-cheaper than a turntable-have made them desirable to both producers and performers. CDM has collected links to many people that are figuring out how to leverage the lightweight rig. [Dan Stowell] put together a tutorial for SuperCollider, the real time audio synthesis engine. The machine is good for simple text based tracker software too. On the Windows side, a lot of software, like Guitar Rig, can be enabled with just a little display driver hacking. This really makes us wonder when we’ll see the first Eee PC keytar mod.