Five years ago, I saved up enough money from my high school summer job to buy an Asus Eee PC Netbook for about $300.

It surfed the web, Skyped, and played Starcraft Brood War perfectly fine. Eventually, I took it to my summer job and used it to play Plants vs Zombies when work got boring - my netbook literally helped pay for itself.

Going into university, I started bringing my tiny netbook over my heavy Lenovo laptop. It was fantastic for doing online WebWorK assignments, Microsoft Office work, and taking notes with Evernote. I even lent it around to friends who ended up using it for travel and school themselves!

Ultimately, this tiny Eee PC got a ton of mileage over the last 5 years straight out of the box. I was sad to see it collecting dust before going into my third year of university, so I decided to try and repurpose it as a mini powerhouse work machine for school.

Overall, here’s everything that I’ve tinkered on my Asus Eee PC:

RAM Upgrade

The netbook comes with a slot in the back that’s just begging for a RAM upgrade. I paid $30 for a 1GB stick of RAM, bumping up my memory to the 2GB max (Eee PC only supports up to 2GB).

SSD Upgrade

The Eee PC came out of the box with 256GB of hard drive. I took advantage of an NCIX Back To School sale and snatched up a 128GB SSD for about $70. Replacing the harddrive on the Eee PC was incredibly simple - the netbook could be taken apart and put back together easily. I followed this teardown guide.

Lubuntu

I wanted a lightweight Linux operating system for my Eee PC to improve performance. My mentor from my last internship suggested Lubuntu, so I gave it a shot.

While Lubuntu is admittedly minimalistic and slick, it’s a pain in the ass to configure. I’ll post some more in the future about the customizations I’ve made. For the most part, Lubuntu is like butter. It boots up in about 10 seconds with the SSD and its memory footprint lets my netbook do more processing (Chromium + PDF Viewer + Eclipse simultaneously).

All together, I’m super happy with my netbook. It’s served me well over the years and I’m happy it’s still serving me to this day. A cheap, recycled, and light little laptop brought back to life for $100!

(This blog post was written on my netbook)

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