One of the things that made the original Asus Eee PC such a big success was the ability to add almost anything you wanted to it. While this might not have anything to do with Dell releasing a service manual showing you how to disassemble your brand new Mini 9, we’re not gonna fault them for making one available.

The service manuals show the proper way to gain access to the various parts of the Mini 9 right down to the motherboard itself. It’s nice to know that the Mini 9 isn’t locked down where simple things like replacing the RAM or upgrading to a larger SSD won’t void your warranty.

[via jkkmobile]

Following the mammoth success of the ROG (Republic of Gamers) EN9600GT MATRIX graphics card, ASUS has released the new ASUS ROG EN9800GT MATRIX/HTDI/512M. ...The new Super Hybrid Engine technology showcases its intelligence via a two-fold process. First gathering detailed information about the GPU loading and temperature, memory and power IC; Super Hybrid Engine then calculates an optimized solution for the best performance. Furthermore, all of this happens in real time, without requiring any tinkering from users...

Tomorrow night at 10PM, Food Network kicks off Alton Brown's latest TV show, Feasting on Waves, where the Mensa-smart kitchen geek and his crew hop into two 50-foot catamarans and sail around 15 different Caribbean islands in search of quality cuisine, shooting and editing the hi-def episodes right there on the boats. It turns out, despite his disdain for specialized kitchen gadgets, Brown is a certifiable gizmophile. He has owned maybe 20 Macs, most recently a MacBook Air and an iMac that has "never crashed." He also has a Panasonic ToughBook running XP, and an Eee PC which he totally loves. He carries an iPhone and at least one Garmin GPS units wherever he goes.

I got him on the phone to ask what, exactly, he used to document his Feasting on Waves experiences, and how he managed to keep it all juiced up, net-connected and dry while meandering through the islands. Here's our fun exclusive interview, with photos of Brown (and his gear) in action:

How do you produce a TV show from a sailboat?
One of the things about the Feasting shows in general is that they have a very small crew, and we are moving with very little space. We are extremely packed and technology dense. We had two 50-foot catamarans—it sounds fun but it wasn’t that fun.

So you shoot and edit as you go?
This year we decided to go completely tapeless: Panasonic P2 cards on 200s. We’re downloading them into our portable Avid edit system. We take as much audio equipment as we take video equipment. The funny thing is, professional audio hasn’t gotten a whole lot smaller. Although hi-def cameras have gotten smaller, lenses have gotten better and battery time has gotten better, audio is still the tricky part of the process for field reporting.

I see you were also using a little Panasonic?
I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in the US to get Panasonic’s HDC-HS100 AVCHD camcorder. It’s got a nice little Leica lens on it. We take everything through a DaVinci color correction system. Once we do that, you really can’t tell the difference between my little camera and the big cameras—it’s all 1080i. We have some scenes that were 100% shot with just my camera.

How did you connect to the internet?
It’s kinda funny, the entire time that I was in the islands, I had perfect e-mail with my iPhone. The entire time. I think there was once, during a midnight crossing, the Anegada Passage, where I lost internet for about half an hour. The rest of the time, I was getting e-mail through either EDGE or something else [probably GPRS].

I did not even take a computer with me on that trip. I decided I just didn’t want to see a computer for a while. And at the time, I figured you know, computers, boats, water, scuba diving. I thought about taking the ToughBook along, and then I thought about taking the Asus because that’s a great little box. Then I thought, the hell with it. I took a few pads of paper, some pens and my iPhone.

You also carry GPS everywhere, right?
As a motorcyclist, as a hiker and as a pilot, I’m pretty sold on Garmin. In the first Feasting on Asphalt, I had a touchscreen weatherproof version of the StreetPilot for my motorcycle that even worked with gloves on. I just really love how their interfaces work. You don’t even need manuals for most of their stuff, the stuff is so intuitive.

In New York, I use Google Maps with my iPhone, because I know where I am—I don’t need GPS. If I was going some place where I needed GPS, I’d use my Garmin Colorado [shown in top pic], which I really really like. It’s a really great marine box. It’s splashproof, but it comes loaded with all the marine functions, so it’s really easy to do marine chart info if you get the right cards for it. You can sail the world with one.

So it was your navi on land and sea?
Everywhere. We basically documented the entire Feasting on Waves journey in the Colorado. Every place we went, we popped a waypoint. It’s got so many easy functions for calculating distance it made navigating around the island easier. Even islands that didn’t have roads at all, we could get good topographic information.

Do you adhere to the old sailor’s adage that you should never have just one form of navigation?
Abso-stinking-lutely. When I fly, I may have full GPS on the plane, but I got a full set of charts too, and I keep the charts out while I’m flying to make sure I know where I am. In this day and age, if I have a major power outage, I just whip out my handheld, the 496, a spectacular handheld aviation GPS. But there could be a catastrophic satellite failure, different things could happen that could make GPS unusable—I guess.

I think your unit would fail before the satellite did.
Something could happen to satellites, you never know. So I always want to know where I am on paper, too.

And on the island, what was your backup?
There were a lot of times where I didn’t have a backup. On islands, I sometimes didn’t have anything else, because there aren't reliable paper maps for those places. The only time I wasn’t using Garmin to navigate was when we were underwater—I don’t think they have an underwater unit yet. We did a fair amount of scuba diving, and you’re still on your own under water. You still gotta use a compass.

I think you just invented something.
Underwater GPS would be spectacular. I don’t know how deep you can go with that technology without having serious problems. Even 50 to 70 feet would be useful. I wonder why they haven’t done that yet. I’ll ask Garmin when I can get that. For rec diving, having that kind of application would be fantastic.

Note: I asked Garmin why there wasn't a scuba GPS, and I got a quick reply: "The reason for no scuba GPS is simple... the signal is deflected by water."

So how do you keep everything charged up?
That’s a problem. Especially on the boats, it was really difficult. We got down there and realized that the power systems on the boats which were all 220V—the power wasn’t clean enough for our editing computers. On St. Martin, we had to go buy a Honda generator to run on the back of the boat to give us good steady clean 120V.

The Colorado runs on AAs, so I took a batch of rechargeable AAs. I ran the recharger for that in the cabin where I also charged my iPhone and my little camera batteries. I had to have three chargers. My other camera only runs on regular batteries, not rechargeables.

What kind of camera is it?
It’s an old metal Canon EF—about 30 years old. I also carry a 35mm Leica point-and-shoot with a fixed 40mm lens. I was shooting slide film in the Canon and print film in the Leica.

So you’re not shooting digital?
Not on this. I wanted Ektochrome—nothing looks like Ektochrome. I’m old school that way. I have a pretty decent Canon digital, and a Leica digital as well, but I didn’t want to have to deal with the chargers, and I wanted super robust technology, so I went film. I like film. You can’t beat it. I spent most of my career as a cinematographer before I went to culinary school, so I just got a thing about film emulsions. It’s still the way I think. I just don’t appreciate digital photography as much as I should.

I know, I know—we managed to get through an entire discussion about a food show without talking about the freakin' food. Good thing there are already clips of the show (alas, non-embeddable) up at Food Network's website, so take a look. The awesome photographs of Alton were shot—digitally—by Marion Laney, ForgottenGulf.com.

Tiens, c’est hier, à l’aéroport de Roissy, alors que je promenais dans la zone Duty Free que je suis tombé sur le SurfOne chez Virgin, un netbook que je ne connaissais pas ! Evidemment, pas un vendeur pour me renseigner sur les caractéristiques techniques mais ça ne doit pas tellement se différencier d’un Asus Eee PC 701 ou d’un Airis Kira. Désolé pour les photos, c’était en vitrine et mon Nokia E71 a fait comme il a pu

While the ASUS Eee PC 901 doesn't have its solid-state disk drives encrypted by default, if you are storing any potentially sensitive information on this netbook -- or any mobile device for that matter -- you really should encrypt the data. When you lose a mobile device or it has been stolen, it can be a nightmare if your banking information was stored on there or even just passwords to your Internet accounts. However, what is the performance cost for fully encrypting a hard drive on one of these Intel Atom computers? In this article we are looking at the performance impact of fully encrypting the solid-state storage versus an unencrypted LVM within Ubuntu Linux.

Nachdem der erste Eee PC lange gar nicht zu bekommen war, bieten ihn Online-Händler jetzt sehr günstig an.

HardwareLogic posted a review on the Asus Lion Square CPU Cooler...

There's a shop in Melbourne selling Philips LCD displays cheaply (cheap for Australia):

19 inch $189
22 inch $249

I grew up with the Japanese brands (Sony, Sharp etc.) but others seem to have taken over the market.

Any opinions on brands such as Philips, Samsung, Asus etc.?

While we’ve seen nVidia, ATI and manufacturers like EVGA offer proprietary software control of their graphics products over the years, manufacturer endorsed voltage adjustments have been a long time coming for GPU’s. In the past, third party programs like ATI Tool have fulfilled this role for supported ATI cards, while nVidia users have...

Nous vous en avons parlé il y a deux jours, le N10, le netbook d'Asus doté d'une configuration très haut de gamme comparé à...

Ce netbook haut de gamme d’Asus devrait avoir deux GPU, selon des slides du constructeur.

If we can trust a roadmap that popped onto the web earlier this week, AMD will strike at Intel's Atom with two low-cost, low-power processors in November. One of them, the Athlon 2650, will run at 1.6GHz with a 15W power envelope. Its sibling will be named Athlon X2...

A Dell oldalĂĄn mĂĄr elĂŠrhetĂľ az Inspiron Mini 9, az Asus vadonatĂşj sorozatĂĄba GeForce grafikus chipeket szerel, az OLPC pedig Ăľsszel ĂşjraindĂtja adomĂĄnyozĂł programjĂĄt, az Amazonnal karĂśltve.

Vale, acepto que comparar el Dell Inspiron Mini y el Nokia N96 es como comparar peras con manzanas, dispositivos con propósitos, dimensiones y capacidades diferentes que se enmarcan dentro de categorías hasta hace poco bien separadas, como son las de portátiles y teléfonos móviles. Pero el hecho es que coincide su lanzamiento en el tiempo (el Nokia N96 a final de Septiembre, el Dell Mini 9 llegará a nuestro país en Octubre) y también comparten canal de comercialización, ya que el ultraportátil lo ofrecerá Vodafone junto a una conexión de datos. A eso habría que sumar que, aunque la mayor parte del público de Nokia no está muy interesado en dispositivos como el Mini, hay cierto solape en el público objetivo, el que por las razones que sea busca estar siempre conectado . Cuando toque cambiar de operadora de telefonía, ¿debería buscar que me ofrezcan un N96 o un ultraportátil?

Lo del Dell Mini y Vodafone no es una sorpresa, de hecho Telefónica hizo lo mismo con el Asus Eee (después de la francesa SFR), por lo que podemos hablar ya de tendencia en toda regla. Nokia N96, por otro lado, es más de lo mismo y, al igual que la mayoría de los teléfonos de su generación, no cubre las necesidades mínimas del profesional/usuario exigente en movilidad ni ofrecen una experiencia de usuario que anime a contratar tarifas potentes de datos.

Cierto que hay si unimos lo mejor de cada uno de los teléfonos más avanzados - navegador y pantalla del iPhone, teclado y tarifa plana de la Blackberry 8310, conectividad y batería del Nokia N96 a modo de "pequeño Frankenstein"- podríamos acercarnos a un candidato a sustituto del portátil, pero no parece al alcance de ningún fabricante el ofrecer algo así a corto plazo. La convergencia de dispositivos que tienen en mente algunas compañías podría acabar teniendo más sentido y mejor solución "aligerando" los portátiles que engordando los teléfonos.

Como profesional que se mueve a veces y necesita la conexión para poder trabajar, soy un convencido de los ultraportátiles. Mi experiencia con el Asus Eee Pc es que está más cerca del concepto "bloc de notas con conexión" que al de portátil, pero hay que tener en cuenta que es una versión muy temprana del concepto. La duración de la batería también es el otro gran problema de la propuesta, estos cacharros exigen tener una segunda batería para no depender de estar permanente enchufado.

Mientras intento luchar con el teclado del Asus Eee, cada vez estoy más convencido que dentro de unos meses, cuando toque pelearse con la operadora, cierto perfil de usuario vamos a hablar casi tanto de ultraportátiles como de teléfonos...

Relacionados: Nokia N96, N-Gage y el número de cacharros que vamos a llevar encima y Dell Mini Inspiron, ultraportátil.

Filed under: Laptops

$119 for a battery to beef up a $380 computer? No thanks, Acer, but how about we nab ourselves a $400 Aspire One with the 6-cell already onboard? Yeah, we like the sound of that. Now we've got ASUS, MSI and Acer posing with 6-cells, when are you going to get on board with sexy, Dell?

[Thanks, Jeremy B.]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

- Asus est arrivé le premier sur ce marché avec l'EEE PC, proposé par SFR. Orange commercialise depuis peu un modèle équivalent, l'Akoya mini de Medion. Les deux opérateurs proposent ces produits à moins de 300 euros, mais imposent en contrepartie de s'abonner à leur réseau haut débit sans fil.     -

Comme nous l’évoquions lors de notre article consacré à la révision de la capacité de stockage des Netbook par Microsoft, le Netbook Asus Eee PC 1000H s’annonce en France en version 160 Go au lieu de 80 Go actuellement. Mise à part l’espace de stockage qui double de taille, l’Asus Eee PC 1000H 160 Go reprend [...]

While Asus has gone a little Netbook-nuts, their recently leaked N10 is actually a promising revision on the genre dominated by clones. The 1.6Ghz Atom, 10.2" screen and 2GB of RAM—that's all...

While Asus has gone a little Netbook-nuts, their recently leaked N10 is actually a promising revision on the genre dominated by clones. The 1.6Ghz Atom, 10.2" screen and 2GB of RAM—that's all pretty standard stuff. But three things other than its draft n Wi-Fi and face/thumb recognition have us interested in the N10. First, it's got HDMI-out. And with its small footprint, one can easily imagine hooking this little laptop up to their TV. Second, it's loaded with high quality Altec Lansing speakers. Third, Asus netbooks are finally dealing with that whole lack of graphics card issue.

The $850 fully loaded N10J-B1 will pack an Nvidia GeForce Go 9300M GS 256MB graphics card. That's pretty good for this 3.5lb computer. (We're not sure what's coming in unspecified $750 and $650 configurations.) Users on the go will be able to turn off said discrete graphics to conserve battery life. According to Asus, it make the difference between about 6.5 hours and 4.7 hours of runtime—we're a little skeptical of those big numbers—and it should give us a tiny computer that doesn't act so much like a tiny computer anymore. [BGR]

ZDNet: "I could probably put a keyboard into one of the USB slots, assuming I could find a Linux driver, but that sort of voids the advantage of its small size."