Asus Eee PC 900 Upgrade

Tom Alderweireldt

November 30, 2009

1 Introduction

A mid 2008 Asus Eee PC 900 remains the one and only original mini notebook, but who never wishedthe tiny SSD’s were just a little larger or faster? Many have undoubtedly tried out Nlite in XP or othertools like eeedora in Linux to save space on the tiny SSD’s. In addition, with an old bios version such as0806 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 manythanks to Asus for their newest 1006 bios version.

2 Flashing the bios

The first requirement for a successful Eee PC-900 upgrade is to flash the bios to the most recent version1006 of 3/3/2009, which can be found on the ASUSTek website (select Eee family, Eee PC and PC 900):

http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us.

The original Eee PC-900 has a small fast 4 GB IDE SSD and a slow 16 GB IDE SSD, both of brandPhison. Speed comparison with the ’hdparm -t /dev/sda’ command in Linux shows a transfer rate of 38MB/s for the small disk and 28 MB/s for the large disk.

Quite remarkably, the new bios 1006 now allows the Eee PC to recognize SATA disks. After installationof a SATA-II SSD disk, the second IDE disk in the bios is gone (not installed), but an additional biosoption Sata-Master shows up. A drawback is that an existing Win XP installation can no longer findthe NTloader on the small 4GB disk to boot. As ’workaround’ without reinstallation I found out thatwhen using the ’Esc’ button during bootup, you can still select a boot device and when you pick the4GB Phison, XP starts. (Maybe a hint for Asus to fix in their next bios update?) Nevertheless, a decentSATA-II SSD disk now offers disk speeds over 100 MB/s, more than 4x faster than the old slow SSD, aworld 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 bootwiht the ’ESC’ button, the Eee should automatically start the EZ flash bios flashing program. You canselect a boot medium, but recognizing the the 900.ROM file didn’t work in my case. Apparently youshould 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. Afterinstallation of this program and reboot, the bios flash procedure started normally.

http://www.4shared.com/file/41831558/15efa67f/AsusUpdate_XP_071211.html

As a second important advantage, the 1006 bios now allows more memory upgrades: with the old 0806bios I could not replace the old 1GB RAM with a 2GB Corsair DDR2-667 bar, but with the new 1006bios no problem at all to install the same Corsair 2GB memory bar.

A third advantage of the bios upgrade to 1006 is the improved thermal control. In practice, the fan startsless frequently and much shorter when the PC warms up, whereas with the old bios, continuous fan noisewas rather annoying. Most likely this also helps to reduce battery power conservation.At the end of the flash procedure the following screen is shown:

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Figure 1: flashing the bios

3 Memory upgrade

The new bios allowed installation of a 2GB Corsair DDR2-667 (PC-5300) notebook memory bar withoutproblems. Can be found a.o. Forcom Edegem under notebook memory (or your nearest PC componentsupplier):

http://www.forcom.be/?product=301825

Figure 2: Corsair 2GB DDR-2 667 notebook memory

4 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 issoldered to the motherboard and cannot be replaced easily. The large slow original Phison 16GB SSD iseasy to replace. With the new bios, the Eee 900 now even accepts SATA disk interfaces i.o. IDE. I found3 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):

http://www.mpl.be/products.aspx?id=42&sid=247

Runcore: part no. RCP-I-S7064-C. Availability of this SSD only in the US or UK, and recently droppedin price to 199$ without shipment cost (+/- 133 e). This SSD is the least expensive 64GB I found, butthe slowest with 90 MB/s read and 55 MB/s write speed, but no doubt still much faster than the original

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Phison 16GB.

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/SPD/runcore-64gb-pro-sata-70mm-mini-pci-e-pcie-ssd-for-asus-eee-pc-900-900a-901-and-s101-runcore-64gb-pro-70mm-sata-mini-pcie-solid-state-drive-ssd-for-asus-eee-pc-900-900a-901-s101--8000092B-1231822344.jsp

Super Talent:SuperTalent has several large capacity SSD’s, IDE as well as SATA. I selected the most recent SATAMini2 FPM64GLSE, which I believe to be one of the fastest currently available in 64GB size with 150MB/s read and 100 MB/s write speed. It also exists in 128GB size, but this costs as much as an entireEee 900. I found my FPM64GLSE for 150eat PCHut in the Netherlands, but unfortunately the pricehas just been raised to 171ein spite of favorable US$ exchange rate.

http://www.pchut.nl/productenv.php?id=145659

Figure 3: SuperTalent Sata Mini2 PCIe 64GB SSD

The SuperTalent website offers a nice overview of all available SSD models PDF format, with a lot ofadditional information on speeds and technology used.

http://www.supertalent.com/products/ssd_category_detail.php?type=Netbook

5 Replacing the hardware in the Eee PC 900

Important when opening up PC’s and replacing components: always touch the PC mass and componentsbefore replacing, to avoid static electricity damage.

The backside cover of the Eee PC can be opened by removing 2 screws. The right one is hidden under aEee sticker.

At the bottom the memory slot can be seen. If you push the two rounded clamps to the outside, thememory bar turns upward and can be removed easily.

At the top you can see the 16 GB SSD disk, 70mm long, with the connector on the left side. When youremove both screws on the right side of the disk (with a magnetic head screwdriver to avoid droppingthe screws inside the PC), the SSD rotates upwards and can also be replaced easily:

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Figure 4: Eee PC 900 with opened back cover

6 Overclocking the Eee PC 900

Windows XPThe default Eee 900 processor clock speed is 900 MHz. On battery power it drops to 630 MHz. With(http://www.cpp.in/dev/eeectl/) you can modify several PC settings manually. Starting eeectl inXP installs an extra icon on the menu bar (lower right), showing the current processor temperature.Right mouse click on that icon gives you a menu where you can modify the clock speed manually (stock(630 MHz), medium or full (900 MHz)). The menu also allows to set fan speed and display backlightintensity:

Figure 5: eeectl 0.2.4 screenshot

The program setfsb is also interesting: http://www13.plala.or.jp/setfsb/

As the name implies, setfsb allows to modify the Front Side Bus speed of the PC and really overclockyour Eee faster than factory default. Overclocking is not recommended on battery power with the original4400 MAh battery, because it draws more power and my battery didn’t like that. I now have a larger

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7350 MAh battery. The clock settings of the PC are controlled through the clock generator chip on themotherboard (the PLL-chip).Warning: writing wrong data to the PLL chip can permanently damage your PC mother-board! Make sure you first select the correct PLL chip for Eee (see screenshot - ICS9LPRS906CGLF)and then click Get FSB:

Figure 6: setfsb 2 1 69 menu with Eee PLL selection

Default FSB speed is 400 MHz, PCI-express interface 100 MHz. When increasing both by about 5%, theEee remains stable (950 MHz), but above 1000 MHz it becomes unstable. With CPU-Z you can look atthe result:

Figure 7: Eee running at 950 MHz - CPU-Z screenshot

Unfortunately these settings are one time ( not written permanently in the PLL) and you have to resetthem after every reboot. Possibly (commercial) setfsb versions exists allowing to save the settings per-manently. Make sure you watch processor temperature while overclocking to avoid processor damage. Auseful utility is HWMonitorPro 1.08.

LinuxThe eee-control program also exists for Linux. You can compile the source yourself, but Eee-control alsoexists as rpm package in Fedora 11. This package didn’t work right away. It requires manual activation

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of the daemon - to be studied.

7 Conclusion

After bios upgrade and most of all with the much faster speed of the new Super Talent SSD, one seeshow extremely the Eee was limited by slow disk speed performance. Using the ’top’ command in Linuxto watch CPU consumption of the processes, shows higher usage of the CPU. This also confirms thateven an older Celeron M353 processor had to wait for slow disk response. Even with this processor andthe SuperTalent SSD, the Eee performance now feels like a normal PC. Much appreciated!

With this level of Eee performance, no more need for stripped down Nlited XP or Linux eeedora versions.After upgrade, my Eee could run the complete Fedora 11 installation and boots up in less than 1 minute.With the old 16GB disk, the Eee needed more than 12 hours for a Fedora 11 update, with the new 64GBSuperTalent F11 installs in about 1 hour. Need I say more?

During this testcase I left the Windows XP on the 4GB fixed SSD and in dual boot installed Fedora11 on the new SuperTalent, but with hindsight, since it is so much faster, it would have been betterto reinstall both OS’es to the new fastest disk and leave the old fixed 4GB SSD just as additional datavolume. Maybe I’ll reconsider that later when installing Windows 7 on the old Eee.

Have fun with your Eee upgrades!

Email: tom.alderweireldt@telenet.be

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