Playing with ASUS EEE and Zalman NC-1000

My "desktop" Acer TM4101 laptop is really overheating and so I had to buy some cooling solution to prolong its life and especially make it silent. So now I have Zalman NC-1000 cooler - the best one of all of them! This morning I was EEEsurfing from my bed and the EEE fan started to make its high freq noise. The bottom surface was hot so why not to try Zalman with EEE? Acer was suspended - let's do it!

Zalman has two big fans (max. 1500 RPM) with many holes for better air circulation. This holes exactly fits proportions of EEE. Zalman is connected over USB, has off button and speed control - you can set fans speed from 1200 RPM (quite silent) to 1500 RPM (loud but better than my Acer:).

So let's go on!
Internal fan in EEE started at 55 degrees. With Zalman at 1200 RPM one minute later - internal fan was already off - temperature of 50 degrees. Nice, I could turn Zalman off. But I wanted more and more and more! So - Zalman at top speed of 1500 RPM and nothing!!! EEE stayed at 50 degrees!!! Bottom surface is now really cold, my hands are cold from cold air blowing from Zalman but actual temperature is 46 degrees (with EEE running at 112.5 MHz!!!). And even keyboard is still HOT! Wow ;)

So the result - it's not rumor that EEE has bad design of cooling system - it's right :( We have to wait for fanless EEE with (I hope) better cooling...



PS: I'm going to test EEE cooling capability deeper soon :)

Better browsing experience - Firefox tweak

As you can see, your ASUS EEE PC is really small and its LCD is even smaller. With 800x480 resolution you have to take care about every single one pixel of your screen. And there are several black spots in default configuration of EEE - everything is too big for EEE LCD. Fonts, controls, windows decoration...
So now I'm going to explain some tricks to get more space for web pages and so for better user experience with surfing over Internet waves. This how-to is for Firefox - default browser of Easy mode.

1. Configure fonts
2. Get lightweight Firefox theme
3. Browse in full screen mode

Ad. 1.
Go to Firefox Preference dialog (Edit -> Preferences) and select Content tab. In Fonts & Colors section click Advanced button and set font size and minimal font size. Feel free to set it for your eyes :)

Ad. 2.
Install miniFox theme - it's reduced default Firefox theme. Download it from here and then select as default theme - meno Tools - Add-ons - Themes - miniFox - Use Theme and restart Firefox.

Ad. 3.
When browsing press F11 key. Another F11 keypress brings you to windowed mode.

Enjoy ;)



PS: This is my first blog here (and my terrible english on public:) so I hope it helped you and feel free to ask me EEE related questions (or unrelated about me, my English or whatever :D )