I’ve been wanting a netbook ever since Rob brought his eee to a meeting last winter. The netbooks have a lot of what I consider desirable in a laptop – small, light, and (at least now) long battery life.
My favorite laptop of all time was a Sharp MM10, which was just over three pounds with the extra large battery, razor thin, tiny, and would run forever on a charge. Sure, the keyboard was a bit tiny, but I could adapt to that. Since I carry my laptop with me every day and on every trip I make, it’s the weight and battery that matter most.
So after switching to a Lenovo X-60 tablet when was working on my first book project, I was planning to get a netbook by January. The tablet was nice enough, but I really don’t usually need the tablet functionality and it was significantly heavier than its predecessor, a Dell X1 (my second favorite laptop ever).
That was the plan until I happened to re-read a post by my old friend (and former FWLUG member) Nathan Yergler about how he decided to rejuvenate his MacBook rather than buy a new laptop. Nathan’s always enjoyed getting new hardware, so this got my attention – if he could do better by refurbing what he already had, maybe I could, too.
So instead of moving forward, I went a step backward. I took out the old X1. It was pretty small – about 11″ x 7.5″ x 1″ – it was fanless, had wifi and bluetooth, CF and SD slots… Hmmmm… Even better, it had a 1280×768 display, a 1.2 centrino CPU, and the ability to hold 2 GB of ram (many sites say it’s only 1.25 GB, but in fact, if you put a 2GB stick in the additional memory slot, it recognizes it just fine.
So I thought all I’d have to do was replace the drive with a SSD, and upgrade the RAM, and I’d have an uber-netbook. It sounded so simple. And I even found several posts on line that suggested that yes, that was all it took.
Of course, things are never that easy. The X1 takes a 1.8 inch disk drive, with a micro IDE interface. Fortunately I found a place, Rocket Disk, that had a blisteringly fast 8GB SSD in that size for only 149$. I ordered it and a 2 GB memory stick from TigerDirect and sat back to wait. Of course the RAM arrived in a couple of days and worked fine – I now had 2GB, up from the 512MB that I was used to. Then things started to get interesting.
On the very day that the SSD was scheduled to arrive, I was giving a presentation on Linux Shell Scripting at the Hoosier Educational Computer Coordinators Conference. Since I’d already transitioned back to the X1 as my laptop, I had my presentation ready and examples set up on it. Then, when I went into the presentation room right after lunch to present, the old hard drive died. And I mean died so spectularly that the machine wasn’t even booting – as it started to load, it would apparently check the devices and that drive was so messed up it hung up the boot process for a good 10-15 minutes.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere I managed to borrow a machine to give my presentation, and I was relieved when I got home to find my new shiny SSD had arrived. That’s when I discovered that the SSD was a ZIF device, not a micro-IDE. Ooops…
I spent the evening looking for options and discovered that adapters existed that would apparently solve my problem. The only issue was that they all seemed to be in Hongkong. The story of ordering those I’ll save for another day, but suffice it to say that the boat from Hongkong is a slow one – I’m still waiting on those parts.
In the meantime, I booted with a live Intrepid Ibex CD and used the “Create a USB startup disk” option from the system menu to turn a 4GB usb stick into my main hard drive. It takes forever to boot, but it uses an overlay filesystem to allow file storage (including adding packages) on the system without hassles.
So my uber-netbook is up and running – with a weird appendage sticking out the side, but up and running. I’ll report the rest when my parts start showing up.
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