Asus Eee PC 900 Netbook Upgrade PDF Installation Instructions Manual

Introduction
A mid 2008 Asus Eee PC 900 remains the one and only original mini notebook, but who never wished the tiny SSD’s were just a little larger or faster? Many have undoubtedly tried out Nlite in XP or other tools like eeedora in Linux to save space on the tiny SSD’s. In addition, with an old bios version such as 0806 from 07/07/2008 you needed a lot of luck to find a larger memory bar that worked. Therefore I tried to summarize my very positive experience to give your Eee a second life. With many thanks to Asus for their newest 1006 bios version. The original Eee PC-900 has a small fast 4 GB IDE SSD and a slow 16 GB IDE SSD, both of brand Phison. Speed comparison with the ’hdparm -t /dev/sda’ command in Linux shows a transfer rate of 38 MB/s for the small disk and 28 MB/s for the large disk.

Quite remarkably, the new bios 1006 now allows the Asus Eee 900 PC to recognize SATA disks. After installation of a SATA-II SSD disk, the second IDE disk in the bios is gone (not installed), but an additional bios option Sata-Master shows up. A drawback is that an existing Win XP installation can no longer find the NTloader on the small 4GB disk to boot. As ’workaround’ without reinstallation I found out that when using the ’Esc’ button during bootup, you can still select a boot device and when you pick the 4GB Phison, XP starts. (Maybe a hint for Asus Eee PC 900 to fix in their next bios update?) Nevertheless, a decent SATA-II SSD disk now offers disk speeds over 100 MB/s, more than 4x faster than the old slow SSD, a world of difference for this small PC.

The bios file is not very large and should be renamed as 900.ROM in the C-disk root. When you boot wiht the ’ESC’ button, the Eee should automatically start the EZ flash bios flashing program. You can select a boot medium, but recognizing the the 900.ROM file didn’t work in my case. Apparently you should use a FAT16 USB volume. Alternate solutions exist, such as AFUDOS (see also Asus website). Starting the bios flash procedure on my Eee in XP worked fine with AsusUpdate XP 071211.zip. After installation of this program and reboot, the bios flash procedure started normally. As a second important advantage, the 1006 bios now allows more memory upgrades: with the old 0806 bios I could not replace the old 1GB RAM with a 2GB Corsair DDR2-667 bar, but with the new 1006 bios no problem at all to install the same Corsair 2GB RAM memory bar. A third advantage of the bios upgrade to 1006 is the improved thermal control. In practice, the fan starts less frequently and much shorter when the PC warms up, whereas with the old bios, continuous fan noise was rather annoying. Most likely this also helps to reduce battery power conservation. At the end of the flash procedure the following screen is shown:…

Memory upgrade
The new bios allowed installation of a 2GB Corsair DDR2-667 (PC-5300) notebook memory bar without problems. Can be found a.o. Forcom Edegem under notebook memory (or your nearest PC component supplier)

Overview of Eee Solid State replacement disks
The correct disk type is SSD Mini PCI-e. There are several possibilities. The small fast 4GB SSD is soldered to the motherboard and cannot be replaced easily. The large slow original Phison 16GB SSD is easy to replace. With the new bios, the Eee 900 now even accepts SATA disk interfaces i.o. IDE. I found 3 solutions worth considering: OCZ: part no. OCZSSDMPES-64G. Can be found in Belgium at MPL Edegem, but is very expensive (263 e) and not the fastest (110 MB/s read – 51 MB/s write speed)

Super Talent:
SuperTalent has several large capacity SSD’s, IDE as well as SATA. I selected the most recent SATA Mini2 FPM64GLSE, which I believe to be one of the fastest currently available in 64GB size with 150 MB/s read and 100 MB/s write speed. It also exists in 128GB size, but this costs as much as an entire Eee 900. I found my FPM64GLSE for 150eat PCHut in the Netherlands, but unfortunately the price has just been raised to 171ein spite of favorable US$ exchange rate.

Download Asus Eee PC 900 Netbook Upgrade PDF Installation Instructions Manual


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August 4, 2010 | Posted in Asus Manual, Netbook Manual

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