Sure, the Asus Eee PC comes with 2/4/8/12/20GB of onboard storage space and and SD/SDHC card reader for expansion. But that's just not enough for some people. So the folks at Popular Science decided to hack away at the case and add another card reader.

If you want to play along at home, you'll need a SanDisk MicroMate SD Reader, a MicroSD card, and a USB A to B cable, plus a sharp knife, a lot of patience, and the willingness to void your warranty to smithereens. But when it's all done, you can tell people you poked a hole in your Eee PC and it still works! Oh yeah, and you'll be able to increase your storage, load alternate operating systems, and impress your friends. If your friends are as nerdy as you are.

Not happy with the 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 12GB, or 20GB of solid state memory that came with your Eee PC? It turns out that you can upgrade it -- if you have a really steady hand, a lot of patience, and a soldering iron. Hoschi at Eee PC.de managed to upgrade his 4GB unit to 16GB.

And while Hoschi's posted a bunch of pictures of the process, he has some advice: don't try this at home. The SSD chips are expensive, and he's pretty experienced with this kind of work. Or at least that's what I think he's saying, since my German isn't so good, and neither is Google Translate's.

Update: As Tom points out in the comments, Hoschi's colleage actually performed the upgrade, and he says the necessary software is hard to come by. He got it through his job.

[via jkkmobile]

Wish your Eee PC was easier to type on in the dark? With its tiny size and light weight, it's tempting to take your Eee PC into bed and read the "paper" before going to sleep instead of reading a book. But shut off the lights and it can be a bit hard to find the right keys.

So why not add a backlight? That's what the folks at Popular Science did. All it takes is about $15 in parts, and a lot of patience. According to the Popular Science instructions, the project should take about 3 hours. If you've never ripped apart a computer and hacked away at the insides, I'm going to guess this could take even longer. And of course, there's always a chance that you'll fry the insides of your computer. But hey, the results are all worth it: an Eee PC that glows rather eerily because the light doesn't come through the keys at all, just through the spaces between them.

Eee hacker extraordinaire jkkmobile, the guy who brought us the first touchscreen Eee PC mod, has answered the age-old question: will an Eee PC 900 screen work on an Eee PC 701. The answer? Kind of.

For the most part, the Eee PC 900 and 701 hardware is identical. Sure, the Eee PC 900 has a larger, multi-touch touchpad and a larger screen, but that's about it for the changes. So jkkmobile decided to see what happened when he connected the 8.9 inch display from his new toy computer to his Eee PC 701. And it turns out that the screen works, but you need to hack the BIOS if you want to use the full screen. And of course, the screen doesn't really fit in the 701 casing, which wasn't designed for it. So you'll need some serious casemodding skills -- or some duct tape.

Of course, the whole exercise is pretty much academic. Because if you've already got an Eee PC 900, why exactly would you want to rip out its pretty little screen and put it in another computer? On the other hand, there's nothing that special about the Eee PC 900 screen, so if this works, maybe we'll start to see third party kits showing up on eBay that allow users to upgrade their Eee PC 701 displays.

One of the coolest things about the tiny Eee PC is that it's extraordinarily hackable. You wouldn't think you could fit so much junk inside of its lilliputian case, but hundreds of people have added touchscrens, Bluetooth, additional memory, and other components to their Eee PC units. If you're not an expert with a soldering iron, or if you've got better things to do with your time than mod your own Eee PC to perfection, one hacker has a proposition: Buy his modded Eee PC on eBay -- for $3000, give or take $2000.

The starting bid is set at $2800, and the auction has a Buy it Now price of $3200. So what do you get for your money?

• 40GB solid state memory (8GB solid state drive that shipped with the unit and 32GB of additional storage)
• 2GB of RAM (the unit originally shipped with 1GB)
  
• 802.11 a/b/g/draft n (originally had b/g)
• GPS
  
• 7 inch touchscreen
• Air Play for transmitting audio to an FM radio
• Custom heatsink to deal with additional heat from overclocking
• Bluetooth adapter
• 2 internal USB hubs for connecting all the internal goodies
• Windows XP SP3 plus a hacked video driver to display 1024 x 768 screen resolution (although I wouldn't recommend using this on a day to day basis, as it makes the fonts look horrible)

Apparently the laptop now weighs "less than 3.5 pounds," which is nearly double the unit's original weight. You can find more pictures at the seller's blog.

So far this little auction has gotten a lot of attention, but hasn't attracted a single bit yet. Because to be perfectly honest, if you're willing to spend that kind of money on a light weight ultraportable, you might as well pick up a Macbook Air which has a far more powerful processor. The Eee PC is still stuck with a 900MHz Celeron processor. And no matter how much you overclock it, it's not going to perform like a dual core CPU.

[via Gizmodo]