Acer Aspire One Gets Touchscreen Mod Tutorial

If the Eee PC touchscreen tutorial left you envious and disgustedly eyeing your Acer Aspire One, never fear; there's now a new tutorial for turning the best-selling netbook into a finger-friendly marvel.  The guide uses one of the commonly available 8.9-inch touchscreen panels, easily found on eBay, which come with just about everything you need bar a screwdriver.

Since the kit is designed for those wary of soldering and cutting cables, it's all plug and play – well, once you get the Aspire One dismantled, that is – with the new controller board nestling where usually a PCI-E board would sit, and connecting to where the webcam normally plugs in.  There's a new socket on the controller for the webcam, incidentally.

The downside to a mod like this – beyond the possibility that you might mess it all up, and end up with one half of a netbook-shaped book-end set – is the reduction in brightness, which is estimated at around 15-percent.  Still, on the plus side as well as touch-sensitivity you also get three extra internal USB connections, which would be very useful if you want to add Bluetooth or a 3G modem.