Jonathan's blog

This evening, my other half’s Eee 701 broke.

Whenever she turned it on, the green power LED and blue wireless LED came on, stayed on, and nothing else happened. The screen backlight didn’t come on, no power was supplied to the USB ports and the fan did not start to spin.

I tried the usual fixes – taking the battery out, poking a paperclip in the reset button in the back. This didn’t work.

Next I reset the BIOS. To do this, you need to:

• Remove the battery and disconnect from the mains
• Remove the memory cover from the back with a small screwdriver
• Locate the BIOS contacts. Turn it so the memory chip is at the bottom, and look at the top half (the bit that isn’t covered by the memory chip). The contacts are in the bottom-left corner of this, and they are small copper triangles. I’ve circled them in red in this picture.


The BIOS contacts

• You need to short-circuit the two small triangular copper contacts with a screwdriver for a second or two.
• Replace the memory cover and battery, and turn the Eee on again.
• For me, this worked and it booted normally. Your mileage may vary!

This morning I tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for the first time. My first impression was that it’s very polished and usable by non-geeks.

I’m not an Ubuntu user myself; I use Fedora on all my machines – including my EeePC 901. But my other half, Hana, has an EeePC 701. She’s not a geek, and she just wants something that will work for her. She’s seen XP on a 701 and agreed the 7″ screen isn’t really up to scratch.

Recently we tried gOS on the 701. It’s Ubuntu based and very friendly. It’s well laid out and easy to use. Hana used it for a couple of months and got on well with it. The main problem was that wireless never quite worked properly, and using an Ethernet cable kind of spoils the point of a tiny laptop,

So this morning I swapped gOS for UNR. The installation was painless, and first boot went without hitch. The main snag I ran into on the 701 was that the animated menus made the whole system slow down. This turned out to be a bug which was easily remedied by installing two packages.

It’s early days yet – the system has only been functional for about an hour and Hana hasn’t used it yet. I’ll post again with more comments on UNR when we’ve had a chance to play with it.