The cheap power adapter of Asus eeePC

For 1 year I happily played, surfed and worked with my eeePC 701 4G. Suddenly neither I could recharge its batteries, nor I could turn it on with the power adapter.

With a tester I could easily see that the power adapter was the problem: it was gone, kaput, broken.

16GB SD card, XP and eeePC: does it work?

Yes, it does. But if you are here, probably it doesn’t work with you. Just read along and find the solution to your problems.
I bought a Kingston 16GB SD card, formatted FAT32, and I put it in the card slot of my eeePC. I installed on it Dreamfall and Syberia (nice old adventures I’ve never played before): many directories, many GBytes and many files. So much I/O accesses that many files and pre existing directories on the SD card got corrupted even during the installation.

My longest journey

I’ve seagulls out of my window. There are quite many water channels in the city and everything is rusty and covered with mud. Neverthelss, I am not in Newport, my landlord is a man, I met no Cortez until now and my name is not April Ryal.

Now that I’ve finally saved the Balance with April, I will give a chance to Zoe Castillo, if she will ever adapt to my eeepc. More difficult will be to imagine to wake up in Casablanca, tomorrow.

XP on eeePC on SDD: far better than on SDHC – the ultimate optimization of eeePC

… at least in my case, having a slooow Class 2 8GB SDHC. I re-installed XP on the internal 4GB from my external CD player, I followed all the tricks you can google out on speeding up XP boot (very useful playing with msconfig to remove useless startup programs and disabling useless services via services.msc – but leave prefetch data on your disk, XP goes faster with them ) and slimming XP down after installation (very useful moving some giant windows-update not-used directories from the windows folder to the SDHC – just to stay on the safe side; also CCleaner makes a wonderful job on the registry and .tmp like useless files – Glary utilities seems as good as CCleaner but I am scared it deletes soooo many registry keys). Now I have a light speed OS (30 seconds of XP boot!), still 1 GB free on the internal SDD and all except Firefox (speed it up easily – read here) and AVG is installed on the slower SDHC.

Finally, I can leave now on standby my eeepc for many hours (from 90% to 50% of battery energy after 10 hours left on stand-by), after optimizing the C3 state (even with SP3, read ALL the discussion) and disabling the camera with a small app (same link as the last one).

Firefox 3.0 on my eeePC : NEVER AGAIN

I TESTED the new FF3 all the evening long. I DE-INSTALLED IT and put back the 2.0.14. On my eeePC running XP, the FF3 is terribly slow, even typing is slower and it crashes often. I HATED IT. DO NOT install the FF3. Keep the last version of the FFv2 that worked PERFECTLY.

XP SP3: should I really install it?

Yesterday I connected to Windows Update. The Express Update option gave me the possibility to install the 3rd Service Pack. I don’t know why, but I felt worried about it. I didn’t install it: the picture comes from another website. Did you do it already? Did you install it on the eeePC too? After it:

1) everything was working better than before
2) like before
3) the pc crashed.

What was your experience?

eeePC safe overclock with eeectl.exe

If you have installed XP on your eeePC, with eeectl.exe you can safely overclock the FSB from 70 to 100 Mhz (CPU speed from 630 to 900 Mhz). I tried to go up to 990 Mhz but XP crashed and it took some time to cool down before starting again. In the eeectl forum on eeeuser.com you can see that even changing to low FSB speed can corrupt in some cases XP files. My suggestion: don’t play with it too much and enjoy your eeePC at 900 Mhz, 60 degrees Celsius and 40% fan speed.

Plantronics 260 handset on bluetooth Broadcom 2045 2.0

Setting up those two devices has not been exactly a piece of cake. The problem was: old bluetooth stacks. Now that I installed the last version from Broadcom everything works perfectly. Nice to listen to my favorite music easily carried around on my eeePC being wireless too. Am I a freak?

Software pollution: the hidden drive to hardware pollution

I needed to install a DVD burner on my eeePC. Nero 7 Essentials (E-s-s-e-n-t-i-a-l-s!) was included with the external DVD burner I bought. Nero 7 Essentials installation required 1.2 Gb (GIGA!). I’ve chosen then custom installation: the minimal size I could reach was around 260 Mb. 0.3 Gb on a SDD of 4Gb are a lot for a DVD burning software.

I’ve googled “DVD burner freeware” and I found Burn4free: 15 Mb required to be installed!! And the best thing: it works perfectly (DVD burned at 16x without problems). Avoid software pollution. When you need any program, look for freeware small versions out there: I am sure you’ll find what you need.

By doing this, you’ll hardly need to expand our 500 Gb hard disk and you’ll lower hardware pollution.

Windows XP on SDHC flash card on eeePC: piece of cake!

The cake is big, by the way It took me 24 hours to install, setup and update XP. To install XP on a flash card (I used a SD 8G) you’ll loose your 4GB partition with Xandros (installed on the internal SSD). Use Acronis or any image maker to backup everything, if you want. An external USB CD drive and a 1GB USB stick are necessary.

1) To install XP I followed this protocol ( look for method 1):

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:installxp

I had to pay for WinHEX original version (not so much, indeed). Paypal made it quick and easy. Everything worked perfectly.

2) XP installation CD doesn’t have the right drivers for most of the eeePC hardware. Remember to run the CD given to you with the eeePC to install at least the Ethernet drivers.

3) Problems arrived when I had to install Windows XP upgrades on the flash card of eeePC. I followed what was written here:

http://blog.inventique.org/2008/03/windows-xp-for-eeepc.html

… but anyway the full upgrade took more or less 24 hours BE patient! During the upgrade XP is quite crappy: it freezes often, but at least it never crashed.

Now everything works PERFECT! And by the way, WinUAE is a far better Amiga emulator in comparison to any Linux UAE.

4) To finish, I reinstalled Xandros on the SDD. Now i can enjoy both the fast boot of Xandros or the more friendly environment of XP just choosing which drive to boot.

eeePC 4G – 2GB Corsair RAM – SDHC 8GB – 800×600 – Xandros / XP : it sounds and it works simply GREAT! Click on this post picture to zoom into the screen.

5) I strongly suggest you to backup the flash partition with something like Drive XML. You don’t want to repeat everything again..do you ?