Hacking and other kinds of fun: Upgrading an Eee PC 901

Our oldest daughter has many dreams. One of them is to make computer games. Being a techie myself, I feel I have to encourage such dreams. As a start I bought her a book to learn to program in Python. But to do this she needs access to a computer as well. As it happens I still own an old ASUS Eee PC 901 netbook. To me it is no longer very useful, but it would be perfect for my daughter.

So I took a good look at the machine. The keyboard and screen were still good. The battery was good enough, but one trackpad button was broken. And even when running Lubuntu it felt very slow. To make her first "own" computer experience a good one, I figured I should try to improve it. So I decided to fix the trackpad button, and invest about €20 on upgrades. Given the age of the netbook, it did not make sense to spent more on it.

An easy upgrade was maxing out the ram by replacing the 1 Gb DIMM by a 2 Gb one (8 euro delivered).

Performance of the built-in SSD. Note that this is the 4GB one. Its 8GB sibbling is even slower.

The next bottleneck of the system was the 12GB of flash storage, in the shape of a 4GB and a 8GB module. From what I could gather, this was implemented as some kind of compact flash internals on an PCI-express form-factor, via a PATA bus. Note that the PCI-express form-factor means that it is mechanically like PCI-express, but NOT electrically. All in all, this made for a very slow pair of SSDs that were also expensive to extend or replace.

Fortunately, the SSD connector also had a SATA interface hiding on it. And I already had bought a little PCB to break this out many years before, when I was still planning to use the system myself. So I went to AliExpress, and bought a cheap (13 euro shipped!) Netac 60Gb SSD. To make it fit in the system, I had to remove the case of the SSD and the SATA connector. This meant I had to solder the whole thing directly to the break-out PCB, but that was only a minor problem.

SSD soldered onto the break-out PCB.

Break-out PCB with SSD connected to the mainboard. Unfortunately, there was no 5V on the break-out PCB, so I had to take that from somewhere else.

To make this work even better, I flashed a new "3rd party" BIOS that enabled the AHCI SATA interface, as the stock BIOS only allowed the IDE compatibility mode. Unfortunately, this still did not allow me to boot from the SATA SSD, so I had to keep one original flash module to boot from. But as this is really only used to load the linux kernel and initramfs, that has very limited impact on performance.

New SSD is recognized by the BIOS!

Nice speed improvement!

Apart from the above, I also had to do two small repairs: one was to replace one of the above-mentioned buttons of the trackpad, as that was not working well anymore. The other was to bodge my SATA break-out PCB, as I managed to damage it when I tried to remove a connector.