RAM upgrade

Thanks to a kind soul at the EeeUser forums, I got my hands on a 1Gb PC2-6400 RAM chip. Now, despite the fact that my Eee originally shipped with PC2-5300 RAM, I was 99% sure based on posts in the forums that the faster RAM should work - the MoBo would simply down clock it to suit.

Long story short... yeah, it works. Works wonderfully! Xandros is moving quicker than before, WinXP is trotting along at an almost acceptable rate (keeping in mind that I run it of a USB stick, and PupEee... well, PupEee was so snappy to begin with it's hard to say if there is any improvement.

Having armed myself with a screwdriver and a pot of coffee, I prepared my Eee for brain surgery:

Above is a screen shot from Xandros before the upgrade, showing the available RAM - this is what I've seen since I got the Eee almost two years ago.

The envelope with the new-to-me RAM. Securely wrapped, capable of withstanding what the postal service dished out, it arrived in pristine condition.

My Eee on the operating table, brain case opened, just before the lobotomy.

Just carefully insert the orbitoclast behind the eye socket and swing it medially and laterally to separate the frontal lobes from the... eh... wrong handbook. Sorry... where was I.. yes; undo the two hatches on either side and carefully lift the RAM chip out of the socket.

 

There you have it - one Eee with a terminal lack of memory... but no worries, in a few minutes the patient will feel a lot better.

New memory module inserted... all that was needed at this point was a light and even preasure on the two upper corners to make the module snap in like...

...this. The patient is about to be sutured up and brought out of anaesthesia.

No worries - this wont even leave a scar - unlike my every day treatment of my Eee. If you look carefully, you can see a scratch on the RAM cover.

A quick peek at the BIOS - yeah, looks gooood. Should be smooth sailing from here on in.

Recreated the same screen shot as above - except the RAM is twice as high!

Problem with PupEee

I've been playing with the latest beta of PupEee 4.31 for a bit, with the intent to do a 'proper' review, but I have hit a problem.

Or rather, I have not. Apart from a vague desire to replace Pidgin with xChat, there is nothing that don't work as I expect it to. In fact, pretty much everything works better on the small screen of my 4G than I expected.

Booting is fast too, after I switched from Xorg to Xvesa my Eee now boots PupEee of a slooow SD card in about 30 seconds, and only takes 8-10 seconds after that to have a stable connection to my home WiFi - both is actually ever so slightly faster than the Xandros install I have on the SSD!

The offered suite of software may not be engulfing enough for everyones taste, but it covers the basics and covers it well. Connectivity is well covered by Chrome for web, Claw for email and Pidgin for IM. Creativity and office work is taken care of by AbiWord, Gnumeric, mtPaint and InkScapeLite. For those wanting to plan ahead there is the Osmo personal organiser, and if all you wish to do is to lay back and watch a movie gxine seems to handle pretty much every codec I've tried so far.

And that's just the stuff on the desktop - once you start going through the menu the choices simply multiply. Not bad at all for a distro weighting in at about 100 Mb.

PupEee 4.31 Beta 6

Go grab it - just replace the old files on your USB stick or SD card, delete eee-435.sfs and boot up.
First boot takes a little longer than normal, but the second one is nice and quick again. Not much has changed, according to post #109 in this thread, but it looks a little slicker and nothing seems broken.