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hacks
RunCore 64GB SSD on the Asus Eee PC 901
Nov 29th
Test Freaks recently was able to replace the built-in SSD on the Asus Eee PC 901, benchmark it.
Now, installing it (on the 901 at least) is a breeze, because you can just use the built-in screwdriver to open your 901’s guts and remove the current 4GB SSD. Putting it back in would be the easiest thing in the world I would presume. Well, according to Test Freaks, it’ll just take two screws, and then we’re ready to go.
But why upgrade the SSD in the first place? 4GB obviously isn’t enough to do anything. I practically do most everything on my Eee 701, and dealing with 4GB is a pain in the neck. 64 gigabytes gives you more leeway with space. And apparently, the stock SSD is sluggish.
According to Test Freaks,
The SSD that comes with the EEEPC is slow as molasses, even running the ASUS Linux operating system. For whatever reason automatic update is turned on and when you power up the EEEPC it will start to download updates even if you don’t need them, and even if they aren’t for that particular model of EEEPC. There’s also really no way to delete the updates either, at least not an easy way. So when all of this happens the system bogs down to the point that you’re waiting upwards of 30 seconds sometimes for the system to respond because there’s just no more room on the SSD.
And after installation of the SSD, you can go and put XP on your Eee 901. And benchmarks will prove that you can turn your Eee PC into an actual workhorse. Now if only the SSDs of Eee 701s are screwed-in as well as opposed to soldered. Meh.
How to dissect the Asus Eee PC 1005HA
Oct 28th
Let’s say you want an Eee PC but you want to have bluetooth built-in. You’re not really into bluetooth dongles, and you want to hack your Eee. EeeUser member wacou has posted a guide to take the 1005HA apart safely.
Check out the thread here.
“TwitterCheck 1.05″ – twitter for your taskbar
Oct 25th
During the last days I’ve been quite busy (moved to a new apartment) but managed to write a new win32 application nevertheless (took me two evenings, overall eight hours of work).
The original idea was that I wanted to write some application which actually made use of the LED notifier device – besides of just “manually” lighting it up in different ways. Seeing that Scotts “Gmail Alert” (which I’m using) seems to evolve into a very nice full-featured email client at present time, I didn’t feel any need for writing something email related – so I decided it would be a good idea to do something with twitter (after all, their API is nice to work with, IMO) maybe. After searching for a suitable twitter API wrapper for vb.net, I settled on using the “yedda_twitter” library for the purpose (see http://devblog.yedda.com/index.php/2007/05/16/twitter-c-library/ for more details). The timeline is being fetched, saved and parsed as XML file. The user interface was designed based on bitmap graphics created while playing with the new gimp 2 (making it possible to add skin support in the future if needed), Here’s a screenshot of the main window:
I included a checkbox to enable the thing to autostart when windows starts up, the application remembers your twitter account data (but it hides your password, of course!), and checks your twitter “friends timeline” every minute, then it decides whether the last tweet is a new one or not, and in case it IS a new tweet the LED notifier is lighting up in turquoise, tray icon changes color to red, a balloon popup shows up displaying the new tweet sender’s name and actual message, and on clicking it, the twitter tray icon becomes normal colored and the LED goes off again.
“Twittercheck 1.05″ is available for download here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/twittercheck/
Application requirements are installed “VisualBasic PowerPacks 3.0″ and “.NET Framework 3.5 SP1″, and of course you need a twitter account too, if you want to make use of twittercheck’s features.. 
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