[banzai] wasn’t happy with the performance he was getting out of his Samsung netbook. He decided it was time to do something about it. He noticed that Dell and HP both sell an optional HD decoder card for their netbooks. After a short search, he found one on ebay for only $24. He had to give up his internal wireless, but he doesn’t mind using a USB wireless dongle. Sure this isn’t horribly complicated, but he has information here that might help smooth out the process.
[via OlivierDole]
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Hardware HD decoder in a netbook
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Unhackable Netbooks given to students
Where would be the best place to test out an unhackable netbook? The NSW department of education in Australia thinks that college is perfect . They plan on distributing netbooks, preloaded with Windows 7,and iTunes. They also have bios level tracking and security, allowing them to be remotely shut down on command. With 20,000 of these in circulation, we would think that we’ll see someone proving the “unhackable” statement wrong. We can only hope.
[via slashdot]
Business
New Mobile Chips From Samsung!
Samsung is paving way for the next generation mobile devices with the introduction o f various mobile chips. The company has rolled out two 1-GHz ARM Cortex A8-based application processors, and announced that these chips are capable of 3-D graphics rendering, high-resolution video support, and real-time Internet access, and both have low power architectures. The S5PC110 is targeted at smaller devices like smartphones, and the S5PV210 is aimed at portable computing devices like netbooks or tablets, reports The Information Week. These processors could eventually find their way into a wide variety of devices, as Samsung chips are found in multiple…
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Eee PC NAS
Hack a Day reader [The_Glu] shared with us a project of his. He used an Eee PC 701 he had lying around with a broken LCD, along with three 1TB SATA drives to create a custom NAS server for his house. The server features a number of other interesting components, including USB2SATA converters to connect the hard drives, as well as a 2 line LCD to display RAID information and server status. The entire project is wrapped up in a custom made Plexiglas enclosure with case fans to keep the whole thing cool. While this may not be the first…
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Lubuntu 9.10 alpha image available
The alpha version of Lubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is now publicly availabile. The project brings together Ubuntu and LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. This combination makes for a lighter version of the most popular Linux distribution. Both Xubuntu (which utilizes the Xfce desktop) and Lubuntu are meant to run well on lower resource computers such as netbooks. With the ISO smaller than 400mb and using quite a bit less system resources Lubuntu looks promising.
Right now it looks like the original backup ISO link is down. If you can’t wait, try this torrent.
[via Softpedia]
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Aspire One external antenna
External antennas on netbooks are notorious, from EEE PCs to the Panasonic CF-R1, but this is the first on an Acer Aspire One we’ve seen. [xRazorwirex] sent in his external antenna hack for the 802.11n capable D150, with the intention of increasing performance, but he says he can’t attest to any change. Unfortunately the lock slot had to be removed, but a small price to pay for a big increase in connectivity. The process seems simple enough, and could probably be done within a half an hour. Now that there is an external link why not build a Cantenna,…
Computer
Moblin OS linux for your netbook
There are a lot of netbook operating systems out there. Moblin is one of OS linux. You can use Moblin as your primary OS on netbook. Moblin Project released the Moblin v2.0 beta for netbooks and nettops for developer testing. Moblin is an open source operating system focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized and built specifically for mobile devices such as MID and Netbook.
Moblin is a new version of Linux designed specifically for Atom based Intel processors. Operating system home page includes a calender and your favorite apps and on top you have drop down menus which take…
Computer
Google is releasing a new operating system: Google Chrome OS
Google is releasing a new operating system called Chrome OS and will be available in the second half of 2010. Google has stated that Chrome OS, which is said to combine the Linux kernel with Google’s Chrome browser, will support both x86 and ARM architectures. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. It is a very small, simple, and extremely fast operating system designed heavily for web surfers. Speaking with CNET News , Bill Gates more or less described Chrome OS as just another Linux distribution, saying that “there’s many,…
Tech Support
Google preparing to launch a PC operating system
In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs that is tied to its Chrome Web browser.
The software, called the Google Chrome Operating System, is initially intended for use in the tiny, low-cost portable computers known as netbooks, which have been selling quickly even as demand for other PCs has plummeted. Google said it believed the software would also be able to power full-fledged PCs.
The move is likely to sharpen the already intense competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Windows operating system controls the basic functions of…
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Install Windows 7 on your netbook
No one will ever accuse us of being Windows fanboys; we’re certainly fans of netbooks though (or anything cheap enough that we don’t care if we accidentally burn a hole through it). We’ve heard from quite a few friends that Windows 7 is actually an excellent operating system to run on a netbook and is a dream compared to XP. Gizmodo has compiled a guide to getting the release candidate on your lightweight machine. It’s available now and will work for free for a year. The image is 2.36GB which you need to dd onto a USB device. They…
