HomeTEN WAYS TO UPGRADE YOUR NETBOOK WITH THREE KINDS OF LEVEL
This summarized article originally written by David Murphy from PC World, I try to highlight the point for the rest of technical things please consider to PC World site.
A netbook with a superior battery might have a horrible keyboard arrangement; a netbook with a solid-state drive might slip out of your price range; a netbook with a killer list of specs might be missing 802.11n connectivity. This guide will give you a brighter idea of the kinds of upgrades that could be possible for your machine and skill level.
EASY UPGRADES
Insert a Better Battery
To replace the battery, flip your netbook upside-down and move the two switches from the locked icon to the unlocked icon, and push up on the battery tray.
Upgrade the Operating System
If you want to install a new operating system onto your netbook, you certainly can: Just pop the CD in any external USB optical drive and install away.
Want to dual-boot your netbook? Insert that disc into the external optical drive, restart your netbook, and jump into the BIOS to change the boot settings for your machine. For any OS, if your netbook does have space for it, enter a new partition size of your choosing. Is the default layout of your netbook’s keyboard conflicting with the muscle memory you’ve built for desktop keyboard layouts? Pop an offending key off of your netbook by wedging a tiny screwdriver under the key and gently applying upward pressure.
INTERMEDIATE UPGRADES
Upgrade the Hard Drive
What’s worse: the underwhelming capacity of the typical solid-state drive that comes with a brand-new netbook, or the price difference you’d have to pay just to get a larger drive in your preconfigured netbook build? First, pick the lowest-capacity drive you can purchase when you’re building your netbook on the manufacturer’s Web site (or, if you have no configuration options, just buy the netbook as it is). On the Dell Mini 9, flip the netbook over and remove the two screws that secure the larger back panel into place (since it’s in the center of the netbook, it’s hard to miss). With the Dell Mini 9’s battery facing north, you’ll see a set of four large electronic pieces inside the machine; those are the hard drive, the memory, the network card, and a blank space for a nonexistent 3G card.
Upgrade the RAM
To upgrade your machine’s RAM, first open the back of the netbook and look for the memory. If it does, your upgrade is a success.
Upgrade the Wi-Fi
Upgrading the internal Wi-Fi capabilities of a netbook from 802.11g to 802.11n looks like an easy task at first to do. For starters, just because a Wi-Fi card looks like it will fit in your netbook, that doesn’t mean the card, is compatible with the operating system/motherboard combination. When purchasing a replacement Wi-Fi card, you need to know whether your netbook can support a full-height or half-height card. To verify this, remove the back of the netbook and look for the existing Wi-Fi card. Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, installing the card is an easy task. On the Dell Mini 9, for example, first remove the netbook’s rear covering. The Wi-Fi card is located in the center-right of the system; it’s the card with white and black wires (the antenna) running into it. Gently disconnect those wires, undo the screws holding the card in place, and remove the card from the slot. Overclocking represents the pinnacle of system upgrades that an average user can perform without physically deconstructing the netbook. Owners of Dell Mini 10 netbooks can rev up their CPU through the SetFSB utility.
EXTREME UPGRADES
Some of the crazier upgrades you can perform on netbooks, including the Dell Mini 9, are detailed enough to warrant their own multipage articles.
Add a Touch screen
First up is the process of replacing your netbook’s ordinary screen with a touch screen. Add a GPS Receiver
Inserting a brand-new GPS receiver into a Mini 9 sounds like an easy task, given the size of the device in question. The Dell Mini 9 certainly has plenty of room inside for an integrated GPS receiver, but unlike an average motherboard, the Mini 9’s doesn’t have any open USB connectors to simplify the powering of the receiver. Super Moderator Acabtp of the MyDellMini forum ran wires all around his Dell Mini 9 in search of power for the device, eventually finding success in connecting the GPS unit to the unused mini-PCI Express connector of the Mini 9’s WWAN port.
Add a Drive-Activity Light
In the case of the Dell Mini 9, the netbook lacks a hard-drive-activity light on its front to let you know when your magnetic (or solid-state) drive is in use. Super Moderator UnaClocker of the MyDellMini forum went through the painstaking process of detailing exactly how to add an activity light to a Dell Mini 9 that has been upgraded previously with a RunCore solid-state drive. The procedure requires you to identify the exact pin on the SSD’s controller that’s responsible for the activity reading, solder a wire to the resistor, and then solder the other end of the wire to a resistor that’s attached to an LED.
February 1st, 2010 at 4:46 am
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