Comments for syn.theti.ca

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Adam Hartling

Adam Hartling — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:02:40 +0000

I bought my Eee PC 701 4G back in Easter 2008 and have loved it. This article was interesting for comparing my hardware experience against. I’m currently experiencing the same mouse pad button problem, using double taps now to avoid using the left rocker switch. I did get a handy mini usb mouse from a Novell training course that works great with the EEE pc too.

At one point I believed the internal SSD was dying as the stock Linux was going flaky, but I’ve since reinstalled with Eeebuntu and determined it must of been the install.

I can’t be sure, but I believe my screen is dimming, it just feels somehow darker then it used to, perhaps the lamp isn’t reaching the same temperatures? Otherwise the system has been working great, though it doesn’t get as much use as I take it your two units do.

I’ll have to try DebianEeePC on it sometime soon.

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Ben Armstrong

Ben Armstrong — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:11:25 +0000

Marius, I wasn’t satisfied entirely by my first answer, so I went looking specifically for a dissenting point of view to weigh against my assurances that you need not worry:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html

It may be that in the case of the model 900’s MLC-based 16G flash drive, there *is* something to worry about, according to this article. But keep in mind the article talks about max write throughput because they are concerned with SSD in servers in data centers. It’s highly unlikely you’ll come anywhere close to that kind of demand on a netbook.

That being said, 3 months is still far too soon, so I stand by my assertion that your SSD must have been defective to begin with. I can’t imagine the difference between ext3 and a non-journalling filesystem made a significant difference. The fact that the problem showed up first in your journal blocks is no big surprise, and is in no way an indication that they the writes to the journal “wore a hole in” your SSD, as any existing flaw would statistically speaking tend to show up first in blocks that were being actively written to, (e.g. the journal blocks,) yet wear-levelling would ensure that no one physical block on the SSD was written to more than any other.

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Ben Armstrong

Ben Armstrong — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:33:50 +0000

Marius, the quick death of your SSD means it was defective the day you bought it. I wouldn’t worry about ext3 at all on the new SSD. Your risk now of data loss running a non-journalling filesystem on the new SSD is far higher than the virtually non-existent risk of damage to your SSD by ext3. I speak from not just my own personal experience, but also as one who has talked to hundreds, if not thousands of Eee users over the past two years, many of them with models with SSDs, and many of those using journalling filesystems (this seems to be the rule, not the exception).

p.s. Did you read the article about the myth of limited SSD writes I linked to above? That was a real eye-opener for me, and is why I no longer worry about this, along with the preponderance of evidence backing up these claims from the many users I have talked to about it.

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Ben Armstrong

Ben Armstrong — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:04:26 +0000

A quick thanks to all of you users for helping the Debian Eee PC project be as successful as it has been. As I’ve pointed out on this blog more than once, Asus continues to release a huge number of new models, each with new hardware and new challenges. We simply couldn’t keep up without all of your contributions! The wiki undergoes daily revisions, many of them from you, as we strive to keep it up to date with everything we know, not only about the newer models, but about changes to the software in Debian for new and old alike.

By the way, please note the additions above about the power adapter. This had completely slipped my mind when I first wrote the article, and is a notable weak point for this model. I’ve examined some adapters for later models (e.g. the 900 and 901) which now have angled connectors. They seem to be holding up a lot better than the model 701’s adapter.

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:29:06 +0000

I’ve an EeePC 900 with 20 GB in two SSDs. I kept the 4 GB untouched, repartitioned the 16 GB SSD into two and installed Ubuntu there. The 16 GB SSD died after about three months of usage: I started getting read errors from the blocks containing the ext3 journal. I did one dist-upgrade between Ubuntu versions which may have increased the amount of writes performed on the disk.

I’m afraid to risk another ext3 filesystem on the replacement 16 GB SSD, even though this means unclean shutdowns result in me having to wait for fsck on boot.

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Russell Coker

Russell Coker — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:15:45 +0000

Thanks for working on the EeePC project, my EeePC 701 has been running Debian well since I first bought it (which was when the 901 came out and the 701 was cheap).

I have an 8G SD card permanently installed that I use for swam among other things. If the swap does kill it then I can buy another one - I’m not going to risk having swap kill the internal storage. So 512M + swap has been bearable for me.

I mostly use mine for emergencies, so I carry it a lot without using it. It seems pretty solid as I haven’t had any damage of note.

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Strahler

Strahler — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:42:26 +0000

Hi there,

I’m sorry that my reply is a little bit off topic… but:
Thank you very very much for all the time and work you put in the Debian Eee PC project!!! Of course a big thanks to all other contributors!
I bought a eeePC 901 (August ‘08), and so far, it’s still working without any problems.
But the best thing is, I started with a 6h battery life without wifi, and a 4h battery life with wifi enabled (2.6.29 debian kernel).
Thanks to the latest kernel in sid and the eeepc-acpi-scripts I got a boost from one hour with wifi in use. That means, without altering any hardware I have 5h wifi use now! That’s just amazing!

Cheers
Strahler

Comment on Eee PC care at 2 years by Aigars Mahinovs

Aigars Mahinovs — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:01:04 +0000

Same experience here in EU. Touchpad buttons broke, screen hinges look wobbly, added extra RAM. But I did not have the fan or heat issues - I just removed the fan. When a fan gets stuck it actually generates extra heat, so these puppies should run just fine entirely without a fan and thus with no moving parts. Mine does for a year and a half now.

It has been a great purchase.

Comment on Bits from the Eee PC team, Spring 2009 by Worried About

Worried About — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:52:11 +0000

I was wondering…

Asus Dumps Linux From The Eee:

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/asus-dumps-linux-from-the-eee-1270

Comment on Bits from the Eee PC team, Spring 2009 by Of Course Debian Rules

Of Course Debian Rules — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:57:31 +0000

@Harry Barracuda, do you really need to insult?

We Linux users want pre-installed Linux machines OR Microsoft-Free machines because we don’t want to pay Microsoft extortionist tax.