Hacking The Eee PC

No piece of hardware can stay on the market for long without someone taking it apart and trying to do things the manufacturer probably never intended.  "ivc", a Norwegian hardware hacker, has been documenting the fun he's been having with Asus's Eee PC.  It's eye-opening, to say the least.

"Fearless" is the word that comes most to mind to describe someone who takes anything apart to see what makes it tick.  Me, I've grown a lot more conservative about tearing apart my own electronics unless it's absolutely unavoidable.  Not long ago I disassembled the charge cradle for one of my digital cameras to figure out why it wasn't working anymore (a ribbon cable had come loose), and was able to coax that much more life out of it.  But buying and disassembling an entire Asus Eee PC?  Only for the truly stout of heart.

That's exactly what ivc has done, though.  After doing a basic walk-through of what's inside the Eee's chassis, he conducted a bunch of hard-hacks to add functionality to the Eee that wasn't there to begin with -- like adding an internal GPS or Bluetooth module.  He also experimented with overclocking the Eee (in both Windows and Linux), documented the different BIOS revisions for the computer, and provided detailed instructions for how to get Windows XP running on the Eee.  This last one is not too hard, but does require having a couple of removable USB drives on hand to copy files.  It's enough to make me want to shell out the $300 for one of them myself, break out the screwdriver, and get to work.