UK Netbook Review

Samsung NC10 owner Graeme wanted to add a Broadcom HD decoder card for 1080p HD playback but only had one PCI-e slot in his netbook, and it was already occupied by his wireless card. Not wanting to give up WIFI, or settle for a USB wireless card, Graeme took a soldering iron to the NC10 and added a second slot.

Timm McCoy, over at the MyHPMini forums has started a DIY HP Mini 1000 tablet project.  He has taken apart his HP Mini 1000 netbook, tweaked a few wires and moved some components as well as flipping over the screen already.  He says the next steps are to install a touchscreen kit, and re-install the [...]

Over at Terracode, they’ve done some major work to incorporate Broadcom’s HD Accelerator mini PCI-e card (model BCM70012) into the Acer Aspire one. There were two options to install the external graphics accelerator, either older on a mini pci-e connector into the existing traces on the motherboard or remove the 802.11g Wi-Fi card from it’s mini PCI-e slot and install it there. Initially, soldering was attempted, but after a botched attempt (due to the tiny traces on the motherboard), the Broadcom card was slotted into the Wi-Fi card’s place. That necessitates the use of a US B Wi-FI card, but they though it was worth it to see how the HD ugprade would perform. While they were at it, they also upgraded the HD to a Kingston ssdNow V series 64 GB SATA solid state drive and upped the RAM from 1gb to 2gb.

The Acer Aspire One, despite all the latest and greatest such as the 1008HA from Asus, still a great netbook. As reviewed here at Netbooks Heaven, it has the familiar and still mostly up to date specs of a 1.6ghz Atom processor, 6 cell battery, 1gb ram and 160gb hard drive. You can, however, set [...]