Fujitsu Siemens P1620 announced

I'm a big fan of the P1610 from Fujitu Siemens and unlike some of my colleagues I would love to run Vista on mine. I haven't installed it largely due to JKonTheRun's comments about Vista on his.

Help may be at hand though because Fujitsu have released the P1620 which looks indentical to the P1610 as far as I can tell but will take up to 2GB of RAM, includes a 1.2Ghz Core 2 Duo ULV instead of the 1.2Ghz Core Solo in the P1610 and there is also a 32gb SSD option.

Check it out here: Fujtisu Siemens Store

ASUS Eee PC Overclocking on Windows XP

As you may be aware, the Eee has a 900Mhz CPU which has had the FSB under clocked to 70 Mhz. This not only means that the CPU is running at 630Mhz (70 x 9) but also the RAM etc. This causes the Eee to perform quite a lot worse than a 900Mhz machine would.

There are currently beta BIOS' which allow the user to run the CPU at full speed (at the cost of a bit of battery life) but I'm not fond of the idea of putting one of these on my Eee

People have been doing software clock adjustments before on the Eee but not as easily as it is with Eeeclock, written by dci of the eeeuser forums.

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=9320

When testing this software, i found that my Eee would not clock its FSB reliably to 100Mhz so I modified the eeeclock.ini file to set my maximum overclock to 95Mhz. I also removed the medium setting as this seemed pointless and added a 55Mhz option in the hope i can increase my battery life a bit and keep the fan off a bit more by running at 495Mhz

Here is the line I used in the config file. Notice that there are FSB speed settings which dont have titles, these are incremental steps. This is because changing the CPU speed a large amount in one go can easily crash the Eee. Think of it as like changing through gears.

Freqs = 55,0,495Mhz; 60,0; 70,0,630Mhz; 80,1; 85,1; 95,1,855Mhz;

Finally all i had to do was create a shortcut to Eeeclock in the startup folder with the parameters 55 0 set. This will cause the Eee to switch to 495mhz (55mhz FSB) on startup

"C:\Program Files\eeeclock_0.1.2\eeeclock.exe" 55 0

Thats it, my Eee now runs at 495Mhz but occasionally i can switch to 855Mhz when things feel like they are chugging a bit, flash heavy websites for example. Do take care with this, it is possible (though I think unlikely if you dont go past 900mhz) to damage your Eee doing this.

ASUS Eee PC & Nokia E51 automated HSDPA (Windows XP)

I have been looking for a cheap and seamless way to connect to the internet on my ASUS Eee with the minium of equipment and no hassle.

I considered internal HSDPA but eventually decided on this method to avoid modding my Eee and save on cost (data is cheaper as an addon to my t-mobile contract than as a seperate contract).

My configuration consists of

• ASUS Eee - 4gb SSD, 2gb of RAM & 4gb SDHC, running Windows XP.
• Nokia E51 - Fairly small, neat phone with HSDPA and Bluetooth (and Exchange Activesync Support).
• Cirago BTA310 - Micro USB BT dongle, small enough to never be removed from EEE, this could be modded inside the EEE.

This is setup with a dial up connection called HSDPA using the virtual bluetooth modem (drivers with windows, no third party software is used). Connecting to the internet required nothing more than dialing the HSDPA connection. No interaction is required on the nokia since you can authorise the laptop to be allowed to connect without the phone prompting.

This is a good start, but i wanted it to be easier so I wrote this batch file.

@echo off
:wifi
rasdial HSDPA /disconnect
wait 3
ipconfig >ipconfig.txt
findstr /C:"Wireless" ipconfig.txt
if not errorlevel 1 goto wifi

:hsdpa
rasdial HSDPA
ipconfig >ipconfig.txt
findstr /C:"Wireless" ipconfig.txt
if not errorlevel 1 goto wifi
wait 3
goto hsdpa

You can use my batch file if you want by copying this text into notepad and saving it as "hsdpa.bat" or something. You should also download wait and put it in the same folder, this is to slow down the batch file and reduce its CPU usage.

This batch file detects if the wireless card is running using the output of ipconfig, based on this it dials or drops the HSDPA connection as necessary. This means i can now use the WIFI On/Off toggle (fn+f2) to decide whether i want to use HSDPA or WIFI connections.

This works but required a batch file to be running all the time which is not ideal. The final step was to use firedaemon which allows you to install any app (or batch file) as a system service. I used an older version, firedaemon 1.6 lite which is free.

The outcome of this is that when i open and resume my EEE, it takes approximately 6 seconds from pressing the power button to be online using HSDPA (or WIFI).

In the near future I intend to extend this batch file to dial VPN connections to my work and home routers whenever i am not on these networks. I will do this by detecting what the DNS server, default gateway etc is.

P1610 vs Asus eeePC size

Since my last post I have been using the Fujitsu Siemens P1610 almost exclusively. Its a really great machine and I'm very pleased with it. The battery life is fantastic and I'm finding this feature the most liberating thing about it.

Given my recent UMPC past it just seems enormous to me when I'm using it. I seem to have acres of screen space and a beautiful keyboard with which to touch type!

I wondered how big the P1610 is compared to the Asus eee PC. As you can see from the pictures here there isn't much in it. The Fuji is very slightly bigger, but I do mean slightly. Bear in mind that in these pictures the P1610 has the extended battery on.