This is the first of a series that Jon and I will be doing on netbooks, specifically the Asus line of Eee Netbooks. Jon got a 1000 a while back, and I recently acquired a 900A. Both of us are running Windows 7 RC on the machines (the installation of which will be covered later).
Today, I want to discuss the two hardware upgrades I made to my machine.
First, let’s discuss what it came with:
4 GB SSD — Swappable
1 GB RAM — Swappable
1.6 GHz Atom Proc — Soldered, so not much upgrade potential here.
Had to remove both the SSD and the RAM and replace it with my upgrades, a 32 GB SSD and 2 GB RAM stick.
The upgrade process was quick and easy. Just flip the Eee over
and there are two little screws to unscrew, once they are unscrewed you will see the existing SSD and RAM.
You will need to unscrew two screws to detach the existing SSD, at which point it will pop up, just like the RAM does.
Once both pieces are reaching for the sky, you can easily remove and swap them out with your upgrades.
Something to keep in mind, though, is that you are removing the hard drive of the unit, so you better have a bootable something or other (specifically a thumb drive, since there isn’t a CD/DVD drive) if you want to get the machine usable again. I promptly installed Win7 on mine, but that is a topic for another day (like Wednesday) and another post (which by coincidence, will show up on Wednesday).