ASUS Eee 1000H upgrade potential assessed

The lure of modifying the Eee 1000H was already too much for the TweakTown boys - after all, they’d hardly had ASUS’ largest budget ultraportable in the building for a few days before wiping XP and trying out Vista - but they’ve since taken things one step further and cracked open the casing to take a look at what’s inside.  The outcome is surprisingly good; obviously the bigger chassis has left ASUS free to pick some more mainstream components and standardised connectors, making future upgrades a far more realistic proposition.

The hard-drive, for instance, is a standard 5,400rpm Seagate HDD, which could be readily swapped out for another, larger model (or even a big SSD if your wallet will stretch).  The RAM is an ASint DDR2 1GB 667MHz stick, again, readily exchanged for, say, a 2GB module. Wireless connectivity, out of the box being Azure WiFi b/g/n, uses a standard Mini PCI-E card slot.

Cruel as it may seem, TweakTown don’t stop at a brief examination of the ports; instead they get down to part numbers and serial numbers for individual components such as the CPU.  Maybe not something so useful for future upgrades, but interesting if you’ve any curiosity about what goes into these compact notebooks.  Now I’m waiting to see someone cost these components and give an estimate of how much ASUS pays for each Eee 1000H; they’ve been criticised for the $649 tag, but exactly what profit is there?