Asus Eee Box 1501 Upgrades

Last updated on October 6, 2012

I’ve been wanting to make the Asus Eee Box 1501 PC that I’ve got connected to the television perform a bit better, so having a spare SSD hanging around I decided to do some upgrading. Using the personal version of XXCLONE I was able to easily copy the old 250GB drive to the SSD, and the RAM was easy to upgrade once I purchased the right stuff. I’d initially made the mistake of thinking I had a 1501P model when mine was actually the plain 1501. This meant I’d accidentally acquired DDR3 RAM, only noticing my mistake when it didn’t fit into the slot. After another trip back to Micro Center (and a bunch of waiting^†)

As a result of these upgrades the machine feels much faster, and I hope that the problems I was having with Netflix will be gone. The issues seemed disk related, as things would slow down tremendously whenever there was a bit of disk activity occurring. Running diagnostic tools showed a correlation between slowness and disk busyness too. Since this could also have been caused by paging (I didn’t look at it in enough detail to say if it was or not) I also increased the RAM.

Total price for this upgrade was $63.57 ($59.99 for the RAM, plus sales tax), and was only this much because DDR2 is becoming rare and thus more expensive. The upgrade was done in anticipation of seriously reshuffling the video (broadcast TV, internet streaming, etc) setup around the house. That’ll all hopefully happen within the next week or so.

(The photo above shows the inside of the Asus Eee Box 1501. The disassembly was very easy, but I was strongly disappointed by the wireless antenna. While it looks detachable and has a knurled base, turning it broke the plastic off and revealed it to be nothing more than a snap-on antenna with coax that runs directly to the network card. While not completely broken the antenna is now a bit loose and floppy. Thankfully the RF connection is still intact.)

^† Exchanging the RAM involved waiting in a line to initiate the return, attempting to find the replacement RAM (which listed 5 pieces in stock, but couldn’t be found), locating a suitable alternate replacement, negotiating a price match to the product which couldn’t be found, waiting for the return to be processed, then waiting for the replacement RAM to be brought to the front of the store. This took a total of ~55 minutes.