Hacking Asus EEE

An anonymous reader writes "Torsten Lyngaas has published a set of instructions with photographs on his personal wiki that describe the steps he took to install $450 worth of extra hardware, including a GPS receiver, an FM transmitter, Bluetooth, extra USB ports, 802.11n, and an extra 4GB flash storage drive."

Comments

Honest question

[Pojut]

Why do laptops not have any kind of universal form factor similar to desktops? Is it because of the varying shapes and sizes of the cases? Couldn't laptop manufacturers just design the case around standardized hardware, thus making it easier to upgrade them (or are they already doing this?)

For example...say I wanted to upgrade the video card in my old laptop (provided it wasn't one built into the motherboard)...why isn't there a universal way of doing this, similar to how it is done on a desktop? Cost?

Re:Honest question

[TheRaven64]

It's mainly about size. Every laptop I have bought has been smaller than the one it replaced. A fixed form factor would make this impossible. That said, there is a standard for miniPCI Express and if your GPU is on one of these cards it can be upgraded. Quite a few older machines came with miniPCI slots for things like WiFi or crypto accelerators. They're not often used though, since laptops tend to have everything the designers thought might be useful soldered on to the motherboard.

Re:Honest question

[evilviper]

Why do laptops not have any kind of universal form factor similar to desktops? Is it because of the varying shapes and sizes of the cases?

Laptops are largely standardized. You can swap RAM, miniPCI devices (usually for graphics) WiFi, modems, keyboards, PSUs, etc.

As for motherboards... desktops really aren't standardized either. It's just that ATX is so large to begin with that making cases a few inches larger than an ATX motherboard (...is supposed to be) is hardly noticed, so cases are significantly oversized in both depth and width to ensure every motherboard out there will fit... and nobody cares. With laptops, size is a big selling point, so there's no room for several inches of such a fudge-factor.

When prices on the tech go down much further, so that top of the line motherboards can be made extremely tiny (say, 4" diameter) at only nominal expense over larger boards, you'll see laptops standardized just like desktops were, when the technology advanced to the point where ATX was more than big enough for everybody.