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I had a spare HDD lying around, and was bored, so I decided to throw it in my EeePC and try to install OS X.
Well, to be honest, I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I finally broke down and bought the Asus External DVD drive to facilitate the install.
For the most part, I followed this install guide and used iDeneb’s ISO (Which I won’t link to, since installing OS X is technically illegal on non-apple hardware. My install was obviously just for scientific purposes and will be destroyed immediately. Yeah.), but I have a few things to add.
First, my EeePC 1000H running Asus BIOS 2204 would not allow me to install the modded bios, no matter which install method I used. I tried using Asus Update. I tried using EasyFlash. I tried using AFUDOS. Nothing would allow me to install the modded bios. I either got “Not a valid boot block” or “Too old or incompatible”. I finally stumbled across a fix when I decided to see if I could downgrade to factory bios 1902 (Select Eee Family, then EeePC, then 1000H/XP) and to my amazement it let me downgrade. After downgrading I was able to flash the modded bios with no issues.
Having worked that out, I put the iDeneb disk in the DVD drive, restarted, and tapped ESC while it was booting to get the boot menu. I picked USB DVD, hit enter, and got the bootloader. (Sorry about the quality, cell phone pic)
I followed the guide mentioned above, and in a few minutes the installer was running.
I went through the initial setup, installed the kexts provided in the guide, and had 10.5.5 running on my EeePC. But being a nerd, I had to go and fuck with it, so I downloaded the iDeneb Combo Upgrade kit for 10.5.8 and ran it. It got me up and running on 10.5.8 without any issues at all.
As it sits now, my EeePC cold boots to OS X desktop in right over a minute.
Wireless works, video works, flash works, sound works, etc. The only thing I can’t get working is the battery meter. Here’s a few more screenshots.
Very fucking cool. Playing around with OS X is making me seriously consider a mac for my next computer. Give it a shot if you have some time.
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I checked on EeePC car chargers before, but didn’t think I would use one enough to justify $50. I checked again the other day and saw This One for $15 and free shipping with Prime.
I used it this morning, plugging my EeePC into it and tethering my iPhone for internet.
What can I say? It’s a charger, and it works. It’s $15 shipped. Not a whole lot of reviewing to be done here, it either works or it doesn’t. If it stops working, I will change the rating to zero stars. For now, it gets five.
Buy it on Amazon.com
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I actually upgraded my EeePC SSD from the factory 4GB to a Super Talent 16GB unit a few months ago, but I finally got around to doing a how to. As such, I didn’t actually swap anything, the SSD is the same in all the pics.
First, break out your new SSD.
Power your netbook off, and remove the battery. The right side slider should flick to the right and stay there.
Slide the left one to the left, hold it there, and pull the battery toward the rear.
Toward the bottom, you’ll see two phillips screws. Remove them both.
Pry up a little on the access door, and it will pop right out. The SSD is at the top, the ram is at the bottom.
On the right side of the SSD, you’ll see two more phillips screws.
Remove these, and the SSD will pop up, like so:
Slide it out to the right.
Now slide the new one in, and reverse the steps above. Once you get everything buttoned up, install your OS from a thumbdrive or external DVD, and you’re good to go.
Enjoy your extra storage space 
Super Talent SSD on Amazon
Since I was on an accessory spree, I picked up a CaseCrown case for my EeePC. I’ve been looking for something like this since I bought my EeePC last summer. Luckily the explosion of netbook popularity has lead to a flood of accessories. The factory sleeve is pretty good as far as protection, but I wanted something that could stay on the computer all the time, and also easily carry the basic accessories; the charger and a travel mouse at the bare minimum. I stumbled across this case on Amazon and had to have it. I’m very happy I did.
The case as a whole seems to be of high quality, nice stitching, nice sturdy zippers with heavy thick zipper pulls.
The outer pocket has plenty of room for the charger and a mouse, and I’m pretty sure a small external would fit as well, I’m going to check when I actually find my external, which seems to have disappeared.
And best of all, you don’t have to remove your computer to use it. The straps hold the case on nicely and all the plugs are accessible. I was honestly a little worried that the transparent straps that hold the top part of the case to the lid of the computer would be distracting, but I found that I didn’t even notice them.
This might be my favorite EeePC accessory so far, I love it.
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I had a few minutes of downtime so here are my initial thoughts.
Installation was just as simple as Vista. Format your thumbdrive using diskpart, copy the contents of the ISO to it, stick in your EeePC, reboot, and hit ESC to choose USB drive as the boot device. It should go right into Windows Setup.
Once installed, I grabbed the wifi driver from the Asus website and stuck it on a thumbdrive. I popped the thumbdrive in my Eee, and ran the setup. Once online, windows update took care of all the other drivers.
The first thing I noticed was the new taskbar. Now more like OS X’s Dock than the traditional Windows task bar. You get an icon for each running program. Mousing over the icon shows a thumbnail of each instance of that program. It’s a lot easier to understand when you see it, so here.
Of course, you can still do the Windows Key + Tab thing and scroll through all of your windows.
My impression is that it’s a bit quicker than Vista, but that could be placebo. I’m going to do a fresh Vista install soon, on a different partition of the same disk, and compare both with actual timed tests. I need to back a few things up first though, so it will be a few days.
Another big improvement is the search function. It now is most certainly faster, and offers more detail and more organized results.
The “Transparency Tab” on the side of the task bar is kinda cool too. Mouse over it and all windows go transparent so you can see your desktop. Click it and it minimizes all and takes you to the desktop.
Calculator has FINALLY been improved, including a few different views with different options and operations. Here’s the Scientific Calculator.
Taskbar now has a popup menu instead of just listing 11ty icons in the tray.
Taskbar now lets you choose which programs show up in the task bar and when. For example, you can choose to have an icon only appear when it needs attention (like a new message in a messenger program).
I’m going to spend some more time looking around later, and like I said, I’ll do some direct comparisons between this and Vista, but I thought I’d go ahead and throw some pics and preliminarily impressions up for you to check out.
I’m loving the competition in the netbook market. Since it’s introduction, the 1000H has been dropped nearly $200 while the HDD capacity has doubled and everything else has remained the same. Check it out here.
Just recapping some stuff from my other sites to build up my content base, I’ll have a lot more variety soon.
A while back, I decided to go ahead and grab a larger HDD for my EeePC. I found the WD 320GB drive on Amazon for well under $100 and couldn’t resist. I took the ram cover off, pulled the old drive out, swapped the cage to the new one, and popped it in. Seems as least as fast as the stock 80GB drive, and battery life doesn’t seem to have been effected. It does seem to generate a bit more heat, but not to a huge degree.
I picked up a 2GB stick of Kingston Ram at the same time. I didn’t even bother to document the swap, as you literally just pop the old one out and the new one in, as you can see in the pics. The upgrade is certainly worth it, though I won’t bother going into detail, because there’s a zillion articles about ram upgrades out there.
I just did them together since they’re both easy swaps, and there’s nothing really groundbreaking here.
Sig says it’s a worthy upgrade. Simple enough for a beginner to pull off and a nice increase in storage and memory.
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I recently grabbed an Asus EeePC 1000h netbook.
The idea is an ultra small laptop that addresses the vast majority of people’s mobile computing needs. Most people don’t use lots of processor intensive applications, and don’t really need the computing power of modern multicore processors for mobile use.
The first thing that strikes you is how truly small this thing is. With a footprint smaller than an actual notebook and weighing in at around 3#, it’s amazingly portable.
(Yeah, that’s a Vista login screen, I’ll get to that later)
The included sleeve seems pretty well padded, and leaves enough room for the charger.
The outside does seem to attract fingerprints, but the included cleaning cloth does a pretty good job of cleaning it up.
The 1000h comes with 1gb of ram and a 1.6ghz Intel Atom processor with XP Home. A Linux version is also available. The newer units come with a 160gb HDD, though mine, which shipped in July, came with the 80gb drive. The processor is very efficient from a power point of view, which is one of the big selling points of the 1000h. Most people report 5-6 hours on a full battery with normal usage. Another big plus is the ease with which the 1000h can be upgraded. It uses standard DDR2 ram and a standard 2.5″ SATA laptop drive. I replaced the 1gb ram stick with a 2gb stick, and the 80gb drive with a 320gb drive. I also installed Vista Ultimate, after slimming it down with vLite.
After it’s all said and done, and even before the upgrades really, it’s pretty much ideal for email and web browsing. It lasts forever on a charge, freeing you from having to be tethered to power outlets, and unlike WindowsMobile/iPhones/hiptops/etc, it’s a real computer, running a full desktop OS, and capable of anything any other computer can do.
Ultimately, I wouldn’t suggest it for an only laptop, something a bit bigger and with more processing power and an optical drive would likely be a better fit.
Of course, it’s not designed to be an only laptop. As an ultra portable device for email and web browsing, it’s absolutely perfect.
Here’s how it compares to a 17″ laptop.
Overall, as long as you’re aware of it’s limitations and keep it’s design goals in mind, I think you’ll be very happy. I know I am.
Verdict – Sig says buy it!
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I added the entire EeePC line and lots of accessories to my EeePC Amazon Store.
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