Weekend Projects

Since nothing much was going on this weekend, I had a couple of computer projects to catch up on. First, I went back to last week's Dual P-III. So all the hardware was installed, but the system wouldn't startup. I tried an extra power supply and got the same results. So it's possible that the motherboard got damaged the first time I turned on the system will all the devices installed... maybe it couldn't take the stress. For now, this one is on hold until I get another idea.

The next project was optimizing my netbook, an Asus EEE PC 1000HE. I read about overclocking, but the final result didn't seem like a good enough reward to try at this point. I just upgraded the BIOS to the latest, which allowed the integrated graphics card to take more RAM. I haven't noticed a big difference with this change, but I guess being up to date is good enough for me.

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Get your own

And finally, I wanted to get Android working on a desktop since Chrome OS isn't out yet. There's a very easy implementation called Live Android. You basically download 2 files, combine them to make one ISO image. Then burn that to a bootable CD. Then you boot from that to get a read-only version of Android. I decided to give it a shot with my old Pentium-II laptop and it was perfectly smooth. Check out the Picasa album above for details and screenshots.