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 ?