Trying to repair and upgrade an Asus Eee Pc 1015PE

Undercover_Man

[H]ard Surgeon
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Jan 17, 2010
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Hello. I found my old and barely used Asus Eee PC 1015PE. The monitor doesn't work. I'm trying to repair or replace the issue. Might have to source a replacement part from eBay. While doing exploratory surgery on the laptop, I noticed I could upgrade the memory and hard drive quite easily. I just don't remember old tech from then and even less about laptops in general.

I would like to upgrade the memory It appears to be stocked with a Hynix 1GB DDR2 SODIMM. I'm assuming I have to stay with another 200-pin DDR2 SODIMM, correct? How can I tell what the motherboard supports?

I also saw a Western Digital WD1600BEVT 160 GB. I know I am restricted to a 2.5" HDD, but do I have to also stick with another SATA 3.0 Gb/s? Could I not find a SATA SATA 6.0 Gb/s? Can I search for one that's faster than a 5400 RPM?

I remember the motherboard inside identified as an ASUS 1015PZ. I can't find any info on the motherboard limitations or much on the PC itself as it is quite old.

If I can get this monitor working again, what would you suggest I get for a memory and HDD upgrade? I don't like throwing away tech so I'll find a use for it somewhere. I just remember it being slightly sluggish and not enough space.

Thanks for the help.
 
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I really wouldnt bother spending the money on that. It's too far down the road of tech to be usable. The screen res will be a nightmare. Bin it or put it on Ebay for $10.

10 years too late for that one.
 
I don't mind spending the small amount of money to add more memory and storage. Super budget memory and storage would be just fine. That PC was mainly about cloud storage anyways. Not many ppl messed with cloud stuff at that time. Anyways, I can find a use for this small laptop and doing surgery on it is good practice and cheap. I just don't remember the laptop components or how to upgrade the few things that can be upgraded on laptops in general. This is old so pretty much anything I buy for it is gonna be cheap. I just don't remember what is compatible.
 
I had one of those netbook devices 13 years ago, pretty nifty little device.

mini9.jpg


just grab a cheap SSD and max out the ram.
 
How do I know what limits this motherboard has for memory? If it'll let me go up to a certain speed or capacity then why not take advantage of it. It's old and I gotta take advantage of all the "upgrades", as small as they may be, I can give it.
 
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i played with one of these at work. i put a 256 ssd and 2gb in it and it made a sweet little portable 16bit emu setup.
 
My then-girlfriend had one and I upgraded it to 2GB RAM and an SSD I'm pretty sure. Not a big SSD, I think it was 60GB or something.

Those were so fucking cool I should never have ditched mine. I had the 12-inch version with the video encoder/decoder.
 
...opens up first menu...and it doesn't fit due to low screen resolution.

Those machines were useless 10 years ago.

Bin it.
 
...opens up first menu...and it doesn't fit due to low screen resolution.

Those machines were useless 10 years ago.

Bin it.
I remember that happening on some programs, couldn't hit the OK/Cancel buttons since they were below the screen.
 
Before you spend any money on it, I'd plug it into an external monitor to see if it still boots. If the screen is dead, and the motherboard is toast, I would just buy a cheap one on ebay if you want to play around.

SSD and RAM are really your only upgrades. SATA 6Gb/s should be backward compatible with the 3Gb/s SATA connector just limited to the slower speed. Either way, the slow as dirt Atom CPU in it is going to limit the usability.

They were neat devices back in the day. I had an original EE 701 with Linux on it that I wiped and replaced with Windows XP. Fun times. I had the 10.1" Acers, Asus, etc. I found that the 11.6" with a celeron or similar processor was generally night and day better than the Atom based computers if you want a small laptop. Also, the keyboard at 10.1" generally has a small right shift key tucked somewhere inconvenient which is an absolute no buy for me (see the picture of that Dell above where the shift key is on the right side of the up arrow key).
 
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Not trying to dissuade you from doing something that makes you happy by repairing that old system, but you could likely buy something new that is WAY faster than that old Netbook.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/646649/evolve-iii-maestro-e-book-116-laptop-computer-dark-grey

I think you'll find that Intel Atom N450 to be the bottleneck with that system by a huge margin.

I do miss NetBooks. I had an Asus 1008HA with an Intel N280 in it. Upgraded it to the maximum RAM it could hand (4GB), but eventually the CPU became the problem. Being slow and only 32bit.
 
Something else I realized is that modern N series Celeron processors are an order of magnitude faster than those old ones.
 
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