We’ve previously seen one modder add a touch screen to his Eee PC 901 and built it into a kitchen cabinet. It seems he’s not the only one to make this move. Another modder has modded his Eee PC 701, given it 2GB of RAM, a touch screen along with a TV receiver and sound system. He’s then added it to a kitchen cupboard, making it a “Kitchen PC”. You can see the video of how he did this below.
Old netbook models are inevitably going to drop in prices, and this is currently the case in Taiwan, albeit it’s not because of the typical reason one might expect. Instead of dropping prices for their netbooks solely due to the increasing number of new models and reduced component cost, both Asus and Acer are issuing price cuts for their SSD-based netbooks because of their built-in SSDs. SSD adoption isn’t as hot as it used to anymore, and the hard drive remains the premier choice for large and affordable storage on netbooks. Due to this price drop, the Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD costs only $202 USD while the 20GB SSD-equipped Asus Eee PC 701 goes for $260.
A diligent poster on the Eee User forums has come up with a way to take old laptop battery cells and put them together to form a 12-cell battery pack for his Asus Eee PC 701. The work is done by a single person, and the end product won’t exactly win any design awards, but it does give a netbook up to 15 hours on a single charge. It’s worth noting, though, that a single charge of this thing lasts 12 hours from 0-100%. So it depends on how you look at things whether you consider this to be a good thing or just a hassle. No instructions are available, but you can view more photos at the Eee User forum post linked below.
When you think about netbook operating systems, I bet Android never comes to mind. But you know what, that versatile smartphone OS can actually be used for netbooks, and while it doesn’t work great (a lot of the applications are undoubtedly incompatible or not practical), anyone looking to have a quick spin of Android without having to buy an Android handset should pay attention here. There’s a detailed how-to for installing Android on the Asus Eee PC 701 out on the interwebs, and all that’s needed are the following:
1. A machine running Ubuntu
2. An Eee PC 701
3. A USB flash drive (the instructions don’t say how large it needs to be, but I’d think a 1GB stick would do)
Needless to say, installing Android will mop everything out from the Eee PC 701’s built-in storage. And the method detailed in the how-to doesn’t work for other Eee PC models for now. If you have some knowledge in kernel hacking, you might want to offer your help in this open-source project.
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