One of the better parts in preparing for a long journey is that you get to buy all kinds of new gadgets. Some are more boatish gadgets (chartplotter, GPS, radios) and others seem more common.
Our new gadget is a tiny little PC from Asus. The Asus EEE PC 1015PEM. And of course the first thing to do is to get rid of all that stupid ‘Intel Inside’ and ‘designed for M$ blah’ stickers. – I don’t get it why PC manufacturers still put them. But hey. Then I boot it up once to verify that everything works (yes it does, I hear some Windows start sound and can see the loging screen). That means: now it’s time to disassemble and upgrade that thing. Of course I ordered a memory upgrade and also a SSD-harddisk to replace the oldschool 250GB disk that’s inside. And the best part: when replacing the harddisk, I also get rid of Win7 automatically. Hehehe.
Here some pics I took from the upgrade procedure. I would not like to do that too often since most of the casing is held in place by little plastic clips – and they don’t seem to be too stable. Well somewhere there has to be a difference between a €300 laptop and the €1300 MacBook with metal casing… Today in the evening, I’ll install Ubuntu Linux and all the programs we’ll use later on (OpenCPN, Sailmail, zyGrib, fldigi, Faxviewer, etc.). Enjoy your weekend !