When I saw an article on the Internet about someone who had used matte black car tape to cover their EEE. The tape is meant to cover cars as an alternative to painting them and you might have seen similar tape used for large ads on buses and so on. The tape is cheap as it cost me about $30 for a roll shipped to Norway, which in my book is not bad. You should be able to get it much much cheaper if you live in a country like the US and can track somewhere that carries it. Applying it takes some getting used to and air bubbles are much more of a problem with this than with vinyl skins and the likes, but once you get it on the end result is also much better looking. It’s also possible to stretch the tape, which means you can get it to fit around curved edges perfectly without getting any wrinkles. The guy who did this in the article I read said you need to disassemble the netbook to cover it completely, but that isn’t really true. I put sheets of paper over the screen and keyboard and then cut out the screen/keyboard with an exacto knife leaving only the casing with tape on it, easily removing the excess tape as it only stuck to the paper not the screen/keyboard itself (which may have destroyed the LCD or ripped off keys). The end result is awesome, and paired with a matte screen protector you’re left with a netbook that looks a hell of a lot more professional than the glossy, fingerprint magnet nightmares that are actually sold.

Skin is from eBay, the cutouts around the screen didn’t fit 100% but otherwise nice (hadn’t expected 100% perfect from eBay). Matte screen is done with the help of a ViewGuard screen protector.

Tiny DIY USB connector I made for my Sansa Clip+. Instructions here.

DIY angle adapter I made to get rid of those giant USB dongles sticking out.

Moded FiiO E3 USB powered clip-on headphone amp, paired with my Beyerdynamic DT770.

VX Nano mouse and Wacom Bamboo tablet with custom DIY low-profile mini-USB cable.

Sometimes I’m amazed at some of the products that doesn’t exist. Yesterday I was looking around for a anti-dust kit (port covers) for my EEE 1101HA’s unused ports, but only found some for wholesale in China. Other items I’ve needed for my EEE is a better angle adapter, and while you can buy something along the lines of that one it’s nowhere near as small or usable. I also needed a smaller mini-USB cable as I use a Wacom tablet at school to take notes and when it’s placed beside my EEE the USB plug sticks out from the EEE and covers part of the tablet. Apparently, no-one has though of making a low profile USB plug before, at least not as I could find.

Pics really tell the whole story… the angle adapter is covered with Fiio model clay which is a material that you cook in an oven for 30 minutes and it turns hard as plastic. I’ve used it for other projects before and it’s really nice. If anyone require an angle adapter or a small cable, email me using the info here.

(One of the angle adapter pics shows how far the USB drive sticks out without the adapter, faded)

The concept here is two-fold: Add an analog volume knob, and make it USB powered. The volume control part is easy, just wire a stereo potentiometer to the line-in and you have an instant volume control that is much more accessible than the built in digital volume control of any computer. For the second part, you need more parts. USB plug, two 10uF capacitors and a 1.5V voltage regulator. Caps go on both in and out pins (between in and ground, between out and ground) and the USB plug carries the 5V to the input of the voltage regulator where it will magically turn into the 1.5V that the E3 natively runs off of (1x AAA battery).

Lastly I glued both the 3.5mm input jack and the USB plug to the Fiio in a way that makes it plug straight into the side of my EEE 1101HA, no lose cables, and act as a natural extension to my netbook. That way it’s not flimsy or clumsy in any way and I plug my headphones into the E3. The volume control works great and the bass boost is awesome. Best of all, it’s a very cheap project.

I always have a fast 4GB SDHC card in my netbook for transferring files, backing up etc- but sometimes I come across situations where I need to transfer something to or from a computer without a card reader (or one of my own computers and I can’t find the card reader). I’ve been using a small microSDHC card reader with a card to act as such a “shuttlecraft”, but it’s nowhere near as quick as the Ultra II SDHC card I use and it takes up an extra USB port.

The solution I’ve known for ages to be this SD Plus series of Ultra II cards from SanDisk, but they seem to be out of production as I’ve ordered them from several palces and gotten cancelled orders (twice) or the wrong item. I finally found a UK seller on eBay selling them for a decent price, and jumped on one.

The concept behind the card is simple: It’s a full size Ultra II SDHC card, but hinged in the middle to reveal a USB connector. That way it fits into any standard SD card reader – such as the completely flush one on my 1101HA – while acting as it’s own card reader. Awesome.

Using the 1101HA at school and out and about I often find myself with annoying reflections blocking my view, making it hard to impossible to see anything. I started searching around and found a company called ViewGuard that sold matte screen protectors. The price was decent albeit the shipping rate was a bit much, but I ended up buying two 11.6″ protectors which totalled $60 with shipping. Today they arrived and I managed to put one on at the first try with no air bubbles or trapped dust.

The result is pretty good, and while it does degrade the screen quality slightly it helps immensely with the reflection problem. It spreads out the light making clear reflections a thing of the past, and you’re left with some light blobs instead. Since the eye won’t try to focus on these, it’s very effective at making the screen easier to see.

Below are some pictures showing the result- note that the camera doesn’t provide an accurate representation of the result since it focuses on the screen not the picture behind it. Either way, it works and it works well.

Before:

After:

Outside, screen pointing towards the (cloudy) sky:

Reflection in the frame vs reflection in the screen:

When I first got the new netbook and bag a few weeks ago I immediately put on a new strap and my water bottle hook. Today I bought the school’s new “eco friendly” thermos cup which gives you cheaper hot beverages (hot chokolate in my case) which I need now that the temperature is dropping. As with the water bottle however I’m not a big fan of lugging stuff around in my hands, so I immediately started drawing some skecthes and ideas for how to make a holder for it on my bag.

A few skecthes and some hours later the holder is done, mounted and working perfectly. I also made an addition to the water bottle “device” to make it more stable (not swivel around like crazy). I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Windows Vista should never ever be on a netbook. Heck, it shouldn’t really be on any computer – it’s a resource hog that doesn’t really deserve to be alive. Windows 7 however is much more low-end hardware friendly and can easily be run on a netbook. This results in a generational split where your choices in Windows systems for you netbook is between the 8 year old XP and the brand new Windows 7.

Resource usage

One of the major limitations of netbook hardware is the limited system resource you have, such as a slow CPU and limited amount of RAM. While more and more netbooks come with easy access to the RAM, there are still netbooks out there where you’re more or less locked to the 1GB that comes on the machine.

Windows 7 is definitely the most resource needy OS of the two, as can be expected. Running 7 with no other apps you can expect it will use about 450-500MB of RAM depending on version etc, and using Aero, desktop widgets and other Windows 7 specific features will not help with conserving RAM. With 1GB however you’ll most likely not ever have any RAM issues, and if you upgrade to 2GB RAM you can forget about memory consumption altogether and let it run wild.

When it comes to CPU usage Aero and such features will again be the real resource hogs that make 7 the loser. If you run 7 on the basic theme you won’t really notice any difference, and even with Aero on it’s more than usable – I have Aero on the 1101HA and even the 1,33GHz Z520 CPU can run that fine.

Bottom line is that the only things that will really affect the smoothness of the OS on a low powered netbook on 7 vs XP is the features than XP don’t have anyways, and so it’s not really an issue.

Drivers and compatibility

Many people have asked if it’s even possible to run 7 on their netbooks at all, due to drivers and compatibility issues with such a new OS. The answer is both yes and no. Some netbooks will run fine with 7 on it, while others will have problems. The basic hardware will in most cases always be supported, but things like ACPI drivers (the software that’s specific to the netbook, controlling for instance FN keys and such) might not work on 7. In the case of the 1101HA, you need an older version of the BIOS to make the ACPI drivers work. The main issue with this is to get FN keys to work, so it’s not extremely critical even if it doesn’t work.

Applications will run just fine on 7, as it also features a compatibility mode which lets you choose exactly what OS you want 7 to emulate when installing a program. This is something Vista had issues with when it was launched, and not having this problem on 7 is very important for usability – even if most apps you might run on a netbook are mainstream and will already be optimized for Windows 7.

Basically, you should always check with people who have the specific netbook to see what the issues with 7 might be before installing. No matter what netbook you have, there’s a forum somewhere with someone who’s already tried it.

UI and usability

This is where the real differences between the OSes show. XP is old, and is starting to look the part with overly complicated menus, a star menu and task bar that isn’t very low resolution friendly and general quirks that reflects it’s age. Windows 7 however looks very polished fluid. Windows 7 is to XP what Maemo is to S60, if you know smartphone operating systems. The “awesomebar” as it’s called (task bar) itself is a reason to run 7 instead of XP as it uses icons both for shortcuts on the bar and also for running apps – instead of those giant labels XP uses. This is much better suited for low resolution screens, and it also nests windows belonging to the same program within the same icon to save space. This works by default for actual windows, but over time it will also work for tabs withing FireFox (already works for Internet Explorer tabs). The task bar is a mix of open programs (has a button shape around them to indicate they’re open) and shortcuts you’ve placed there – basically a mix between the dock in OS X and the old XP task bar.

If you right click the awesomebar icons – the ones that are pinned to the bar as shortcuts – you will in some cases get a menu of locations within the said shortcut. For instance, the shortcut to the libraries can be right clicked to bring up a menu with more detailed locations on the computer, such as removable drives, individual libraries and so on. With some apps it will display the last used files, and so on. You can drop in new shortcuts within this menu, such as shortcuts to hard drives or specific folder locations. This way you have a full list of locations on your computer accessible from a single icon on the task bar.

While the task bar is especially useful for netbooks, there are hundreds of new interface tweaks in Windows 7 that is useful no matter what computer you’re on and so it’s naturally better than XP on netbooks as well. Small things like being able to snap windows into place, the libraries, less Windows 98 looking menus etc all help to provide an overall better experience when using Windows 7.

Conclusion

I like Windows 7 a lot. The tiny amount of extra resources it uses over XP is not enough for me to give up on all the new features that running 7 gives you. The awesomebar itself (that’s the actually name, btw) is a reason to win 7 – especially if you have a low resolution netbook. There are of course more differences than I’ve touched on here, but these three topics seem to bewhat most people are curious about when it comes to Windows 7 on a netbook. It is important that you check driver compatibility before upgrading – from someone who runs Windows 7 on the exact model netbook you have – but other than that I say go ahead with 7.

In my wallet I keep fours flat USb drives the thickness of SD cards – or rather 2 USB drives and 2 microSDHC readers with cards in them. These four drives can solve a LOT of problems one might run across when out and about and someone snags you fro some on the spot tech help, and they’ve done so several times.

My most used drive is a bootable version of Ubuntu. I used to have a 8.04 USB drive, but finally got around to making one with the latest version 9.04 on a microSD card (one of the white readers in the pic). This lets me boot any computer into Linux, either to troubleshoot hardware issues (like “my wireless card doesn’t work” “…in windows or at all?”), extract files before re-installing an OS after the current OS won’t boot, or use tools like gparted to non-destructively partition the HDD.

Secondly, a bootable USB drive (again a microSDHC with a reader) with Windows 7 install files. Since I use a netbook all the time, it’s nice to have everything I need to repair or even reinstall the OS if I have to right on the spot (of course I have a dedicated partition for files containing both documents/pictures etc and install files for all apps I use AND backups of FireFox and Thunderbird, so I don’t even need an Internet connection to restore the system 100% on the go – if I have to).

My old taped up 4GB USB drive is currently serving as a portableapps drive, containing my own version of FireFox and Thunderbird as well as 7zip, Open Office etc etc – If I need to move files using the drive for pure storage, or if I’m using someone else’s computer and want my own applications (run straight from the drive without installing), that’s all on the drive.

Lastly, I have a 1GB drive with a bootable version of Spinrite using FreeDOS. Spinrite is an app to do serious bottom level data recovery from hard drives on a much deeper level than those wannabe-tools that run from inside the OS. This little pendrive helped save files from an HDD that the IT guy at work had just a couple of weeks ago.

That’s it, four powerful computer tools that put together take up about 1/3 as much space as a credit card. If you’re a serious geek and used to being ambushed by people who learn by doing stupid things on a computer (like not backing up files) tools like this can make your life a lot easier.

For those that don’t know, sleep mode is a feature on laptops where you basically log off and leave the computer in a sleeping state, using very little battery but still being able to wake up straight into Windows. The major benefits of such a system is that a laptop can become more like a smartphone where you can pick it up and check something quickly instead of having to plan it in advance to have time to boot.

Saving those few minutes to get a ready system is very nice for me since I can then use the netbook for quick tasks throughout the day without having to go through all the hassle of cold booting. Right now I’m in the cafeteria at school, 12 minutes until class starts and I just picked up my 1101HA and woke it to write this post.

The upgrade from the AAO was always about fixing minor annoyances, and this was one of them. It’s nice how the small things make the day that much smoother.