Asus EeePC made to support Pentium M processor
By Jonathan Schlaffer
The Asus EeePC is the little laptop that could. Fitting in the UMPC class, it is a small lightweight laptop but some say it could be more powerful. The Celeron M processor used in it is not exactly fast. The upgrade is not for the weak-hearted as some soldering is required.
Asus decided to use a Celeron M 900MHz processor due to its low power usage but it’s not exactly a speed demon. Not that the EeePC is slow, though the Celeron shows weakness when trying to run several applications on the EeePC at once.
Someone known as “Guryhwa” managed to replace the Celeron processor with a 1.2GHz Pentium M and this gave it quite the performance boost. However, the hack has a problem. The processor cannot be made to operate at 1.2GHz and is stuck at 840MHz, which speed wise (only) is slower than the Celeron.
That does not matter, because the Pentium M has a larger cache than the Celeron and manages to speed things up on the EeePC quite nicely.
It’s a nice hack, it’d be even nicer if Asus started using a better processor in the EeePC as well. Here’s hoping the ones with Windows XP/Vista ship state side. Those operating systems need a bit more horsepower than the Celeron is capable of providing. How about it, Asus?
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February 26th, 2008
nah, keep the low power specs — it runs Linux wonderfully (Debian Testing with KDE 3.5.8 right now, on a 4GiB SD card) and helps keep Windows “gotta-have-this-SINGLE-app” people away. I like that. Those who can stand to learn enough about a computer to try a replacement application or two will do just fine on the current system.
May 31st, 2008
Dont be fooled by the 900mhz label. These days there’s alot more to measuring a processors capability than frequency alone. The chip used in the eeepc is not the same as an old 900mhz chip that would be found in an old desktop. Things have chnaged alot since then and there are other ways to measure a chips true speed. To be honest the performance of an eeepc is very fast. The boot time is faster than most desktops I’ve used and when you click something the reaction time is very fast. I’m posting this comment using firefox 3 on an eeepc that is running gnome as the window manager. I haven’t had any problems with multitasking. The wi-fi works great and so far I’ve had no problems with spyware of viruses.
September 13th, 2008
This piece does not take into account the fact, although the eeepc’s processor is nominally rated at 900 mhz, it is actually under-clocked at approximately 640 mhz. That is why the 800 mhz “M” chip seems faster - it *is* faster. But eeepc owners with an aversion to soldering needn’t fret, there are over-clocking hacks detailed at http://wiki.eeeuser.com.