Broadcom Crystal HD Video Accelerator Tested in Dell Mini
The Broadcom Crystal HD (BCM70012) is not exactly news, but we’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to it here because it’s taken so long for it to come out. Also, never mind that nVidia’s Ion solution is, well, pretty damn good. However, for those of you who have a netbook and would like to enjoy HD video on it and don’t have the good fortune of having a Ion chipset, you may be in luck because this $30 mini PCI-e card may breathe a little life back into your netbook.
Intel Atom D510 Review, Performance, Etc. Round-up
It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at what Intel is up to these days and counted the Intel Pine Trail updates among those things. So, in honor of it being almost a year since talking about what Intel has been planning for their ever expanding netbook and nettop line, let’s look at what is finally on the verge of coming out in the near future to a netbook or nettop near you.
Atom Patch for Snow Leopard 10.6.2 = Happy Netbook
Once again I find myself in the position where I’m unable to test this for myself, namely because I’ve had problems getting Snow Leopard to install on any of my netbooks, but some people are reporting success with this. Therefore, with the intention of disseminating information and possibly helping some folks out, allow me to redirect you to Insanely Mac where there’s a forum thread with a patch and some translated instructions. (Scroll down to post 7 for short and sweet instructions.)
If it works for you, let others know!
OS X 10.6.2 Is Out And Nixes Atom — Netbooks Beware
I hesitated to post anything about this when it originally came out in one of the developer seeds that OS X 10.6.2, the latest update to Snow Leopard, had removed (or intentionally sabotaged unofficial) Atom support. It looked like that was certainly the case, and then a few days later another build had Atom support restored. However, 10.6.2 is officially out today and the various sites are reporting that Atom support is in fact gone.
Guide: Install OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on Asus Eee PC 1000HE
This is going to be yet another one of those really quick posts where I apologize for not highlighting this sooner and also telling you that someone else (or a few, really) has done the leg work and that I’m going to point to their work as an excellent starting point. So, if you’re looking for info on installing and running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on your Asus Eee PC 1000HE, then do I ever have links for you!
First off, once again the folks from the smallcomputing.net forums have come through in a big way and have a thread already going that’s full of info, troubleshooting, and kexts that should be of great help to anyone who may not know where to start or is having trouble in the process. So, here’s the good stuff:
Is the iPod Touch/iPhone the New Netbook?
If you caught the Apple “It’s Only Rock and Roll” event this week then you may have seen the following picture.
Photo courtesy Engadget
If you paid attention to what Phil Schiller was saying while he was on the stage, he was basically implying that the iPod Touch (and I think more so, the iPhone) is Apple’s answer to the netbook market. Sure, he didn’t come right out and say just that, but if you remember that Apple has said in the past that they have no interest in getting into the “nascent” netbook market, then this kind of makes sense as being their answer to it. The funny thing is that the answer has been there in front of us for over two years now.
So, this brings us to the question: is the iPod Touch/iPhone the new netbook?
Guide: OS X 10.5.7 Retail (Vanilla) Install on Asus Eee PC 1000HE Netbook
Ok, short and sweet. Want to know how to install retail (vanilla) OS X 10.5.7 on your Asus Eee PC 1000HE? Read the detailed forum post by LonelyTV on our forums here (it’s one of those awesome community efforts). No sense in me trying to reinvent the wheel, so click away already. I apologize for not having pointed this out to everyone sooner.
And since I know people will stumble onto this later with questions aplenty — there’s a lot of information in that thread as well as the forums in general. Even though some of these articles get a lot of comments, the answers are, frequently, already in the forums if you have a minute or two to poke around.
Cheers.
P.S. I’ve seen a lot of 1000HA and other variants mentioned in comments lately and all I can say is there’s no guarantee that the steps involved for installing on the 1000HE will work exactly the same on other models. Even though Asus makes all of these and they more or less have the same hardware, there are occasional differences in the netbook models that creates incompatibilities.