Wills Waste of space-time

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:58:03 GMT

To all people with EEE PC 1000HE's and 1000H, I think I've finally identified a source of big trouble.
Yep, I believe I have figured out what is
a: slowing them way down, and
b: what makes them crash after they've had the lid shut to standby.
Yep, it falls directly in the lap of the ralink wireless cards.
Seems that these guys simply can't write drivers to save themselves, and the result even with the latest 2860 driver pack from their own page, the poor machine with one of these cards in it will be inherently unstable.
If you turn off wireless lan, Notice the *massive* speed improvement and stabillity as well!
If anyone knows of a fix, perhaps even really old driver versions that might work, I'd be glad to try it.
but I'm considdering taking my poor old 701 that I really don't use much, and hi jacking the Atheros card out of it as a replacement for the rubbish!
No wonder this string of these machines were so cheap on catchoftheday!!!
The first 1000he I bought had an atheros card, and RF wise it wasn't as good, but at least their drivers don't destroy your stability!

Olympus DM520

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:14:59 GMT

I just had to blog about this, as I think they've finally done it! Yep, for all you TBRN people, I have just bought an olympus that is seriously worth looking at. The DM520 is considderably cheaper than the older ones at USD $199, and the sound is not bad at all! Of course, mine went streight into pcm wav mode, and manual levels, and then some recordings got done both with Wizzzo mics and the internals.
Here are some things I've found so-far.
I think my old Iriver h140 might have just met it's match certainly for
size and battery life, but very possibly mic amp quallity as well.
As for the Zoom H2, I think it's almost bin meterial!!!
Some things I've already discovered
It seems that for the best Hifi mic recordings, you put the mic sensitivity up high, and set to manual levels and then you can use left and right cursor while recording to drop the level to where you want it. Low sensitivity appears to have more amp noise than high, I think it must use a pre attenuater to do that. so for mic recordings in manual level mode, high is best. The other thing you can do that I don't think any of the previous Olympus recorders could let you get away with is set the mic sensitivity to low and then wind it back a fair way while recording in manual record with the left cursor, and the mic jack becomes a perfectly good line in jack. Ok, As we all used to bag out the olympus's for various things, they are IMHO all fixed now.
1: the menus all talk, perfectly accessible. I think with counting, you can also set the clock which has been a complaint, I'm still not sure how to do this yet, but the Pearse thinks it can be done without sight.
It now has manual record level with fully variable levels. It can record in PCM .wav in 44.1 and 48K, Not bad! It has removable AAA batteries, No nasty in built Li-ion like the bloody Irivers
Can all you 340 owners say "DIE" together? The previous Olympus's also forced you to use the inbuilt flash, which can in theory die at some point. This one has a micro-SD slot, so I'll be buying one of these cards pretty soon!
If I really had to pick anything with it, the internal mics are a bit top-heavy, sort of churchish, but this could be fixed in soundforge, and would probably knock out any last vestige of amp noise if you did that. All in all, for about $300 AUS fully shipped, it's excellent!
If you buy it through Pat Ferguson (See the review on blindcooltech.org), and a few people want one, combine the shipping, it's *way* cheaper that way!
So, I think Olympus have Definitely got it completely right at last!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:59:51 GMT

I Was on the phone With Craig last night, and we came up with a bizarly odd invention, but one that would probably take off like mad!
I would certainly buy one if it existed!
Basically what we had in mind is an MP3 player in the form of a cassette tape.
So what you say?
Well, this device could have some interesting features.
First, It would obviously have a head in the front so the tape player could play it as if it was a cassette a bit like those 3.5mm to cassette adapters you find now and then.
the spool holes could be used for cue/review, so the tape recorders RW/FF could rewind or forward it.
Where the tape window is, you would have the display, and to be really clever, it could have circuitry that could detect record bias, and actually record to memory if bias was detected!
It would naturally have a 3.5 headphone jack berried in the side somewhere for normal use as well, but it would just drop into any stereo system or car tape deck with no other FM or other devices required!
Somewhere also, it would have a mini-A USB jack for charging and copying your music onto it, and some other buttons for navigation etc that would probably have to be accessed before it gets dropped in the tape deck for playing.

Now, imagine the looks you'd get on a train in the morning at peek hour when you pull out a cassette tape, plug a headset into it and start listening!
Then you start moving around your music by sticking your finger in the holes and turning the spools!!!
Someone *must* make this now! If anyone out there feels like earning a nice little bit of money designing and building such a device, I'd love to hear about it!!!
Heh Heh!

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:53:01 GMT

The Geek strikes again!
Yep, I've beeten the patheticness of windows again, or, perhaps that should be the even vaster patheticness of freedom scientific! Clearly the latter, well, both really, company is much too busy forming litigations against any innocent company they can find to bother writing JAWS properly any more... OK, it seems that jaws 10, specifficly J10.0.512.exe appears to drop a butchered form of the visual basic runtime on your PC. Sadly, windows is getting the evils of Linux, where everything you install these days seems to depend on one or more of the following bits of system blote! dot net framework 1.1, 2, 3, No, they're all required, they aren't versions like you'd think, and of course visual C++ runtime. The outcome of this mess, is that many things that are installed after this event including any later versions of JAWS, AVG8.5, and probably un countable other things fall over screaming at install time, and don't give any valid reason for it. Fortunately, I did eventually, after hours of googling find the visual c++ problem mentioned berried up to the neck in some obscure AVG forum, and I have worked out a solution that fixed that, and Woohoo, also lets the newest versions of JAWS install as well. Ok, here it is for anyone who has had the problem. First, you have to get rid of the garbage installer references to Microsoft visual c++ runtime that freedom scientific have kindly dumped on your system. I used the windows installer cleanup program (msicuu2.exe), but I think c-cleaner and others have facillities to perge entries out of the install database where they can often be way more trouble than help! It usually solves the problem where you can't install or uninstall something because some file usually located in a rediculous place such as "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp" can't be found. These programs are so badly written, that they can't even get the data out of themselves to replace it even though it's come from their own installer in the first place! Anyway, to fix it, go into the installer cleanup util and remove the installer entry for microsoft visual C++ runtime, and exit. Then install Visual C++ redistributable, (vcredist_x86.exe) downloadable from Microsoft, again which should work this time, cross your fingers, and suddenly JAWS later versions such as J10.0.1154.exeand Late versions of AVG might condecend to actually install properly at last!

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:15:46 GMT

This is probably one of the most weered things I've had happen in computing, but I did manage to sort
it out and the fix is bizarr and although it's repaired, I'm not entirely sure why!
I tried to install sound forge on the new eeepc 1000he on a second hard drive, a 320gb Western digital I
had lying around which had to be better than the 160gb provided.
This had an XP pro system, another improvement I really wanted, on it that I'd made from scratch using my trusty old unattend bootable CD.
My new Shintaro USB dvd burner from OO direct I got last week was also used to boot it and do the installing.
Anyway, after convincing all the drivers and programs I wanted on there to work, No, I didn't put anything Norton anywhere near it, Thanks very much, it all appeared to be a perfect working system.
That was until I attempted to get soundforge going!
Seems the computer ID was changing at random which is, as you'd imagine, something of a problem!
I decided to try the same thing on the bog standard system that was still on the drive that came with it, and ... No problem...
So, what the hell was going on?
Well, I made file cloans of both the default windows and my built one onto my desktop machine, deleted the stuff in the prefetch directory and cleaned out the hklm\system\mounted devices key in the registry
which makes XP quite happy to be coppied onto any other hard drive if you ever have to upgrade one.
Well, the tables turned when I effectively swapped the 2 encarnations of windows onto the other drives, and I now had the default one on my 320gb drive and the one I installed on the first partition of the OEM 160gb drive.
Both booted up quite happily, but oddly, my built system now on the 160gb drive no longer had the sound forge problem. So, it seemed to be drive, not, system related!
Of course, the OEM system on the WD 320gb drive started exhibiting the random computer IDS.
Naturally my conclusion was that the WD drives do strange things with some ID field, and I decided to give up and just use the 160gb drive and to hellfire with it! That was fine until I then re partitioned, built a quick and dirty unattend install of windows on this 160gb drive, I didn't want it in 4 partitions, to make it all bootable, and then copied my xp pro files onto it. Guess what, the computer ID went random again.... F**ck it!!!
Ok, so it isn't WD drives being weered at all, it must be something to do with the partition table, but what!
Well, I don't know, and probably never will, but what I did in the end was to fire up good old GRML linux off the CD vier USB and DD the first few sectors of the OEM 160gb image I had carefully kept onto the 320gb drive.
I then used linux's fdisk to delete the 4 partitions and re made one big one which I then set to type 7, set it active, and wrote it back.
I then put this drive in my sata doc, (every geek should have a couple of these)
and let XP on my desktop format it to NTFS.
I then coppied the built XP pro system back on yet again, crossed fingers, held breath and waited to see what would now happen!
Miracle 1: it booted!
and.....
Miracle 2:
Problem solved. Now sound forge, and probably any other app that uses hardware info to stop you enjoying their product registered and works!
So, there's something about the partition table that comes with the EEEpc 1000he and probably other models, that is different from whatever the windows install CDs make during the install.
Also, I had tried the following:
dd-ing /dev/zero over the partition table(MBR) to make it look like a brand new hard disk.
then partitioning the drive from fdisk under linux and formatting under XP on the desktop.
This was a complete failure and I think that was because the MBR didn't have the mucrosoft Id, and wouldn't even boot. so it had to all be based on an fdisk edited version of the OEM partition table that Asus provide out of the box.
What I'm not entirely sure of is just how many sectors are involved here.
so I tended to be safe and splat about 64 of them from my backup image onto the drive just in case!
I wanted to document this for my own purposes, but if it helps someone out there, good!
I certanly got no joy from googling at all when I tried!
so if this go's up, that should, in theory, change!!!

W

This would be hilarious except it's dead set true!

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:21:19 GMT

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Solar power in Australia

Tue, 19 May 2009 09:53:36 GMT

For anyone who cares, I now have about 1020w of solar panels on the garage! This is an initiative of the government, which is going to run out or more accurately change for the worse at the end of june. The government pay $8000 to you for a start, and then, (Clear solar) at least, sell off the RECs for, a further 1 or 2 thousand. The system as standard is about $13000 so after it all and any other discounts you can get, you can end up paying between about $150 now, to a couple of grand which I did a couple of months back. It's certainly worth doing for the cost of the thing is a tiny fraction of the worth of the parts, but there are some pitfalls, that the advertisers may happen to neglect to mention! These tend to revolve around the power meter you need to fully optimize the government rebates on this system. The first problem is that you may have a fair bit of trouble even getting the meter. I don't know what the wait is for it, but I have heard it can be a while! The second one as described to me by one of the sparkies who installed it, is that these meters apparently measure power usage in half hour blocks, with the peek power listed for that half hour. Basically, this means that if you spend a minute boiling a kettle for a coffee, you'll pay for over 1kwh => 2400W at half an hour. This *Really* sucks, as you really only used about 1/15th of that amount to achieve that. It also means that if you use an air conditioner, you'll pay for half hour blocks of 3kw even if you only ran it for a couple of minutes. I really hope this guy got it wrong, but I fear he knows exactly what he's talking about, So, Be ware! I might be better off not to push too hard to get the meter changed over. At least although the old mechanicals are not able to graph time and give you the large 60c/KWH credits for what the solar system pushes back into the grid, you at least pay for what you really use. The old mechanical meters will spin backwards if you generate power, but you only sell it back at the 15c rate you buy it for. The average is you use less power. The other question I must ask, is what these new meters do with bad power factor. As most of us tend to apply inductive loads, so the current lags the voltage, they could well charge you the peek for both! If anyone cares, I'll write here once I have the facts! To RECS. I should describe this as I understand it, as it was fun finding out, but thanks to Tiki for most of the explanation of them! Basically, this is a gamble on the part of Clear solar, and maybe other companies, where they are assuming that Carbon trading will definitely happen in this country, and that when it does, you have to pay for causing pollution. You can also gain money for negative pollution, I.E. generating solar or wind power. RECS are like units of credit as a price for X amount of CO2 emission. If you generate "clean" power, and you want to do the phone book of paperwork to prove it, you can make money in this trading scheme. What Clear solar are gambling on is that you allow them to claim the credits of your system for 15 years at what they perceive to be market prices. This currently comes to over $2000, so makes a nice big cut in the price of getting a system installed They then (hopefully) are able to do all that hideous paperwork which you or I probably never would bother with, and get that money back on the market, Probably bought by a big ugly company who wants to make a mess of the place and are prepared to pay to do it!!! Of course, if the scheme never happens, someone could get Very bankrupt, but they are gambling on it happening in the next few years. The current price of electricity here is somewhere around 15c/KWH. so if you run a 1000W heater for 1 hour it's 15c. That will vary with different re sellers, (Thanks To Geoff Kennett for making a hideous mess of our power distribution here in Victoria) but it's a rough average. If you currently have off peek power, usually on a mechanical timer here, or Solwega controlled in other states, you get power for about half that price. The new meters will graph these times and can also detect if the current vs voltage reverses, which then gives you 60c, Yes, 60c per KWH back for what your solar system pokes back into the grid. (I wonder if you get peek credit over half an hour for that!) So, it's definitely best for people who go off to work during the day and turn everything off during that time. The ideal is to use no power during the day so you send out all the power you can, and do the dishwasher, tumble dryer, etc. after about 11 in the evening. I think it might also be worth having, if you can get it for anything resembling a reasonable price, a battery storage system so you can charge it off peek, and run things from it during the day while your solar inverter pumps the grid. I'm still yet to figure out what exactly the government gets out of all this investment, but I'm not complaining!!!

sound cards in eee pcs

Sun, 10 May 2009 01:35:47 GMT

Well, It seems contra to my previous suspicions, that the eee pc, in fact any of those realtech type sound cards in laptops can record line in and what's more, do it rather well! I, of course also tried it as stereo mic in which it indeed is, although the noise is a bit much, about the same as my zoom H2. The frequency response is very nice, however, and I really couldn't pick anything much between an mp3, and its copy made from my eurolab mp3 player running into the eee pcs mic in and then re recorded with sound forge. The realtech util lies and claims you're changing between mic in or line in. Line in doesn't exist, so the only option is to turn off the mic boost in advanced, of course turn off all the echo and noise cancelling rubbish, and take the mic level in record to about 25%
The noise floor go's down to a pretty low level in line in mode, definitely good enough to sample books which is what I'd originally had in mind.
Don't try mic record with the power plugged in, Humm Badness!!!

Hell Saturday

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 08:11:20 GMT

Sat, one could say was one of those days that probably happens 3 or 4 times in a lifetime, and the people caught up in it would, it could be said, be exceedingly glad of the fact!
In melbourne it reached 46.4c, a record for any capitol city ever... in Australian weather history. There have been several particularly nasty bush fires which have as of now, claimed about 65 lives and 850 odd houses. I didn't get much of it here, not really even the smell of smoke, but I do have a couple of family and friends who got a pretty big scare!
I had my own tiny personal battle to keep the air conditioner able to run on about 200v and in at least 46C which I achieved by aiming a tiny spray of water from a hose at the condenser of it.
Oddly, it not only ran perfectly, but way more efficiently, so I'm now inclined to try and build something to do this with the water that naturally runs out the back of the thing. I think some new models do just this, but mine's too old for that idea!
Certainly makes them way more efficient and it's designed to be out in the weather anyway, so I can't imagine any problems doing it.
Today's much cooler, but fires are out there, still out of control!

StarStuffed

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:55:32 GMT

This is something I've been meaning to post about for a while, but I do think it has to happen, and may google latch on to it and carry it all around Australia!
It seems, in a quest to elevate the collective stupidity of Australians, the ABC have decided to scrap one of the remaining few interesting science based programs they run (StarStuff).
Little doubt, it'll be replaced with mind-numbing rubbish like footbrawl thugby or something else guaranteed to keep the audience wallowing pathetically in the single-digit IQ range!
I mean, Goud-forbid anyone might actually want to know what the phoenix probe is discovering on Mars or any other interesting things going on outside the bloody MCG!
They can't even find the effort to keep putting up the pod casts even if they can't spend the radio time to interrupt the lesbian mud wrestling, or the program on the artistic representation of the society for land wrights for gay whales.
That along with this governments screwing down of the CSIRO, is setting us up for 3rd world status asap!
Someone needs to get all the collective football boots and other hard blunt sport-related objects that we hear about adnorsiam on their radio and TV channels and boot the Management of the ABC firmly up the Koit, where, Alas, most of them will probably enjoy it!

Telemarketers: Vermin of the telephone

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:06:31 GMT

Well, if there was any doubt that telemarketers are un adulterated scum, here is the clinching proof!
This details a call I received veer my recently deceased Aunts phone line which is diverted here in case any loose ends have to be tied, I.e. friends businesses she dealt with etc. As you'd expect, she has, along with most of those unfortunate enough to maintain a home landline in Australia, a plethora of calls that I personally, try, sometimes unsuccessfully to screen out. I have, of course, had to somewhat relax this screening process in case something is actually important that should be addressed. So, Yesterday in comes a call from a pretty sus looking number:0385541115 It had, according to my caller ID unit, called 6 times, so I braced myself and picked the phone up to of course, be asked for my aunts name. I explained that she had passed away 4 weeks ago. There was the briefest of "I'm sorry to hear that, and then on with the spiel about diabetes Victoria and Raffles and christ-knows what else! I interrupted and said: "I'm sorry, She's dead!" to which she replied, so, you can't help us? I replied, "Errr, No, I don't think so!" Somehow, I managed to refrain from giving her a real blasting, (Wrongly perhaps), but I have firmly voud that diabetes Victoria will certainly *Not* ever get donations from me, my friends and family in the future, and the event will be published for you Dear reader to judge accordingly!!!
Personally, I think we should all automatically black ban any charity that uses the phone to make un solicited marketing calls anyway. they have wormed their way around the joke the Howard government called a "do not call register" in order to continue their barrage of harassment of unfortunate victims, the public of Australia!
Don't give to any of them!
If you leave me any comments of interest, I'll post details of my method of using my answering machine to both annoy them and screen out their calls.

Hoover nice day!

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:45:09 GMT

I have plans for my washing machine!
It involves getting inside it, making holes in rubber, and of course ozone!!!
The initial experiments were very impressive to say the least!

So, the theory started off:
What would be the effect of bubbling ozone into the wash water while the machine was running?
I decided to do the crude experiment by jamming the tube into the door of the front loader with an air-stone sitting in the bottom of the rubber near the door to find out!
Well, it worked!
I didn't do it durring the deturgent phase, as I figured that could create semi-degraded products that I probably didin't want in the clothes as well as the chance that they might harden and maybe stay there and the almost certainty that the ozone would obliterate the enzime action of the powder, probably something I'd rather it kept!
so the experiment involved powder wash, then a spin to get rid of as much as I could, and then an equally long wash without powder which got ozoned, and the rest of the normal cycle that also did.
Well, I have never known clothes to come out smelling so frech and nice!
Basicly any other smells were smashed beyond retrieval, and replaced with a sort of chloriny smell of ozone and ozonated "stuff" which on drying became that exact smell you get from leaving things out on the line in the sun to dry.
A fair bit of ozone came out during the tumble-drying, but it went out the door I usually leave open while doing that anyway.
For big things like towels and jeans, I hang out, but the smaller stuff, it's just too much messing around so into the dryer they go! It probably go's without saying that everything gets sterilized by this.

BTW. Ozone in the air inlet of the dryer does some good things too, but one should be aware that certainly in air, it can attack rubber like elastic etc which
you probably don't want to have happen.
This doesn't seam to be a problem in water.
I also don't exactly stand in there and breath the stuff while that's going on!
Amusingly, I read a couple of days ago, that Sanyo have released a machine in Japan currently, that does all this and more.
It can even store, ozonate, and fully recycle wash water and
use that for it's inbuilt tumble-drying mode as well!
Bank account permitting, another ENALY OZX-300AT will be ordered this week I suspect
These ozone generators are pretty good for the relatively cheap price you pay for them, although you might want to be somewhat technically competent with replacing plugs, and other hopefully miner repairs required to get it going once it's delivered.
The other thing you'll certainly want to do is buy some *Real* silicone tubing to use in the ozone path, not the fake PVC pretend silicone tubing they palm off to you with it although I don't think the small ammounts of hydrochloric acid that the ozone burns off this PVC would have any effect on my wash cycle!
Of course people normally use these generators to sterilize drinking water, and
in that case, HCl isn't exactly desirable.

Computing gets Ugly sometimes!

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:36:28 GMT

I honestly never thought I'd ever find a software package that does more damage to an instalation of windows or put rubbish into more parts of the registry than the symantec/Norton products! Well, I have!

Welcome to vmware! Specifficly vmware6.

Getting rid of Nortons is like deleting a dos program compared to cleaning up this thing!

I made the decision the other day that seeing as I wasn't using it for the forseeable future and that I could always put it back on if I had to, I did what anyone would do and went into add/remove programs and asked it nicely to uninstall. "Oh No" said VMware, I'm going to screw you because you didn't guard the file: vmware workstation.msi with your life! it had apparently been placed in a very safe location on my hard drive, somewhere where no cleaning util or me included, would ever dare to touch:

docs and settings\usernsme\local settings\temp.

Now, We never clean up temp directories do we???

Disk cleanup never does or c-cleaner or any other program you like to have the infernal gaul to use to slow the rate of natural windows style bloating and degradation! so, by some bizar devine intervention this little bit of cryticle data was gone! "No," said vmware, "I'm not doing a damm thing to help you, not unless you have that file!"

"but I don't have that file!"

"Well, tough!"

I then tried installing it again to see if it would put itself right for an uninstalation. That normally works with most windows software. Not Vmware, Noop, same erroer and no way to repair it or get past it. Clearly the only option left was to manually rip the rubbish out by the roots. First I deleted all the related directories I could find involved with it. Then I ran c-cleanerThat smashed 550 odd broken registry entries. I did a second pass.

That removed another 250 odd. Finally it declaired itself clean again.

I then ran registry distiller which is a bit more thurrough and it made a backup reg file that was 250k in size, I shudder to think how many more entries were cut out into that!

I then went into services and manually smashed out about 7 or 8 entries for the various bits of vmware that put hookers into your network, keyboard, usb etc. That was fine until I removed the keyboard one and promptly lost use of the keyboard. Even a usb keyboard wouldn't give me access!

Oops!

So, out with the old 40gb hard drive in the super rack on the floor for the alternative xp for this machine and a usb restoration of a backup registry on the main c: drive.

Rule 1 always keep backups!

Then I rebooted it with keyboard returned and of course repeat all the above steps minus the keyboard service! I also had to manually search for vmware registry entries and rip out a good 1000 of those by hand in places that the cleaning programs aren't game to venture. So, that's about as far as I've got, I've pulled out every reference to the garbage, but any attempt I make to see if I can convince it that it's never been on the system and do a clean install still fails! Anyway, the system runs twice as fast as it did with Vmware installed and would probably be slightly better if I could figure out what exactly to do to restore the propper windows keyboard service without the vmware .sys file being pulled in. BTW: It managed to break Kursweel somewhere along the way so it had to get re installed too!

So, a word of warning for any Cavi students or anyone else thinking of installing vmware, I suggest building up a windows that you really don't care about and can afford to throw away at the end, or just never use anything to clean your system until you've uninstalled vmware again!

Of course, that doesn't make any guarantee that the uninstalation will condecend to work even so! One thing I know, It'll probably never let itself be reinstalled on this system again!

One day I might see if anyone can give me a copy this vital MSI file and see if I can fix it, but then I bet the uninstaller will leave thousands of garbage registry keys behind that I'll have to clean out all over again so maybe I should just forget it!

My latest toy

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:06:34 GMT

these are cool!

I had not really bothered thinking about getting one of these until, link khoath, (Ahhhhh, sucked in!!!) was talking about these in his LJ so I had to take a look!

so a bus trip to office jurks whith a (Do we have time for this?) Zoe, convinced me that they really were pretty damm good value for money. I had to go slightly on faith, as half the keyboard was covered by hard metal shop security, No, In office-works, you are not a customer, you are a (probable criminal intent on steeling their stock), so prepare for a security setup that just about makes the average airport look slack!

Anyway, I bought it and Nutts and I had a play with it later, and did the rounds of the linux-based system that comes standard on it before, for accessibillity reasons, smashing the lot and putting XP on it.

They have a 4gb flash drive, which has some rather interesting internal remapping algorithms in it that continuously move often rewritten parts around so are supposed to keep ware and tair even over the entire chip.

I hope it works, as the chip is well and truely soldered to the board in this model.

One story I heard re this flash chip is that even after 10 re-installs of XP, it had only overwritten the whole chip 3 times, so I don't think we have to worry about it too much!

Anyway, we have Xp, jaws, and skype and other things I regularly use in it and all seams good so-far.

Do a google search on Asus EEEPC if you care, but for $488, I don't think you can go too far wrong.

I do, sometimes find myself cheating and plugging in a full 101 USB keyboard though.

test, 1, 2, 3!

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:58:15 GMT

Hello and welcome to, what, I really don't know yet! I suppose most of you won't see this as there aren't a whole lot of friends yet! I'll trawl for thOh, this edit box kind of sucks! I think I have some hacking and buchery to be done! Please excuse the mess. more soon. ose once I find my way around this thing!