Bassam has released an update to AsTray Plus, an awesome Windows utility for the Eee PC that lets you change your virtual display resolution, turn off your monitor, and perform some other pretty nifty features.

In case you're not clear what I mean by virtual display resolution, in a nutshell the current generation of Eee PC laptops has a display resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. It's sharp, clear, and easy to read. But many web pages and applications are wider than 800 pixels and it's hard to fit them on the screen. So Bassam and some other Eee hackers have found a way to tweak the display drivers into acting as if your Eee PC had a higher resolution. Using AsTray Plus, you can effectively squeeze 1024 x 768, 1000 x 600, 900 x 540, or 800 x 600 pixels onto your 800 x 480 display. Now, since the screen actually can't handle that many pixels, what the software does is change tweak the display fonts and other settings, so it'll be harder to actually read text on your screen. I wouldn't recommend using 1000 x 600 mode all the time. But every once in a while it can be a lifesaver.

Version 1.3 beta 3 of AsTray Plus includes the following updates:

• Turn off your monitor from the tray menu
• Show/Hide cursor by hitting Win+C
• QuickSwitch: define your favorite resolution modes
• AppWatching feature will change your resolution when you launch certain applications
• New user interface
• Bug fixes
  

AsTray Plus 1.3 beta 3 will be the final beta version, and AsTray Plus 1.3 final will be release soonish.

[via Eee PC News.de]

Back in January there was a rumor that the next generation of Asus Eee PC laptops would include touchscreens. And then Asus came out and said there wasn't really enough demand to justify a touchscreen device. Makes sense, the Eee PC doesn't fold back into tablet mode, so why would you want to poke at a laptop screen with a stylus when it's faster to use the touchpad or a mouse?

Anyway, DigiTimes is now reporting that sources at a touch screen panel manufacturer say that Asus is planning to slip resistive touch panels into at least some of the next-gen models due out this spring. It's not clear if the touchscreen would be included on all units or if it would be an optional upgrade. Heck, I'm still a bit skeptical that it will happen at all. But I thought I'd pass along the rumor for all you touchscreen enthusiasts.

In the meantime, you can always just buy a 7-inch touchscreen kit off of eBay and build your own touchscreen Eee PC model.

While you're waiting for Asus release the Eee PC 900 with its crisp 1024 x 600 8.9 inch screen, you might want to check out the AsTray Plus 1.3 beta 2. While this isn't the first software hack to enable virtual resolutions that are higher than the current model Eee PC's native 800 x 480 screen, it's the first hack that preserves the display's widescreen resolution.

In other words, while there have been hacks for a while that allow you to squeeze 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 pixels onto the Eee PC's small screen, AsTray Plus is unique in that it supports 900 x 540 and 1000 x 600 resolutions. And since the new resolutions maintain the Eee PC's wide screen aspect ratio, fonts and images aren't squashed the same way they are when you try to squeeze a 4:3 display onto a 5:3 screen.

The end result is that while the display isn't quite as clear using AsTray Plus as it is using the default display resolution, you can read text. And you can fit large web pages on your screen without scrolling side to side as often.

AsTray Plus is a Windows-only application. If you're looking for a Linux solution, you might want to check out a hack using VNC to achieve similar results.

Asus is showing off the Eee PC 900 series at CeBIT in Germany, and jkkmobile got to spend a few minutes checking one out. He also posted a video which reveals a few more details about the next generation Eee PC:

• The microphone moves from the bottom of the unit to the top (next to the webcam)
• The speakers move from the sides to the bottom
• There is a RAM access panel, which means you won't need to disassemble the entire unit to upgrade or replace your RAM.

Still no word on the US pricing, but the Linux version should be available in Europe this April for a price of 299€.

Well, that about makes it official. If Asus can sell the new version of the Eee PC with an 8.9 inch display for a reasonable price in the US, I'm totally hocking my 7 inch model and buying a new one. Engadget got a closer look at the new units at CeBIT this morning, and this time they were allowed to turn the displays on, proving that the new models have crisp 1024 x 600 pixel displays.

While 800 x 480 pixels might be enough for viewing web sites coded in 1995, you have to do a lot of scrolling to view modern web sites on a display that small. And forget about running multiple windows side by side. While a 1024 x 600 pixel widescreen display will be a little shorter than most standard monitor resolutions, I'd say 1024 pixels in width is just about right for a tiny laptop display. Sure, 1280 would be nice, but can you imagine how small the fonts would be with a 1280 x 800 pixel display on a 9 inch screen?

It still looks like somebody won't let the guys at Engadget actually turn on the new 8.9-inch Eee PC on display at CeBIT, but that didn't stop them from snapping some photos of the two tiny computers side by side.

While we'd been hearing that the version with the 8-9 inch screen would be packed into the same tiny case as the original Eee PC, it does look like there are a few small differences. First of all, the newer model has a larger trackpad, which is good. While you can get used to the tiny trackpad and rocker on the Eee PC 700 series, it is tiny. Like really tiny. Like you might find yourself deciding never to use an Eee PC without a mouse tiny.

Second, it appears that the whole case was made a tiny bit larger to accommodate the larger screen. I'm guessing this won't add much weight to the Eee PC, since we're talking millimeters here, not inches. But part of the appeal of a tiny laptop is that it's tiny. So hopefully the newer models don't feel too bulky.

If you're still trying to decide whether to spend $400 on an Everex Cloudbook, you should really check out NotebookReview's excellent writeup of the Cloudbook. It's by far the most thorough review I've read to date, with a number of benchmarks and comparisons to the Eee PC and other subnotebooks.

Here are some of the things I learned from the article:

• There's no RAM access panel, which means you need to disassemble your unit and void the warranty to upgrade or replace your RAM
• There's a Windows driver that allows you to scale your display resolution to 1000 x 600 pixels, a widescreen virtual resolution that has so far eluded Eee PC hackers.
  
• As you'd expect, the 30GB hard drive gives you far more storage than the 4GB SSD found in an Eee PC, but the read/write speeds are much slower
• While the Via 1.2GHz processor has a higher clock speed than the 900MHz Celeron processor in an Eee PC, benchmarking tests show it lags behind the Intel chip in performance

Overall, it probably makes sense to pick up an Eee PC if you want a $400 ultraportable today. Or if you want a bit more oomph, you might be best off waiting a few months. Asus and Everex both plan to offer updated models later this year, and several other companies will get into the low-cost ultraportable business by the end of 2008 as well. Still, I'm kind of jealous of that virtual 1000 x 600 pixel display driver. I really wish it worked with the Eee PC. While there's a hack that will sort of display 1024 x 768 pixels on the Eee PC's 800 x 480 screen, thats like fitting a square peg in a rectangular hole. In other words, it's really hard to read any text.

Want to trick out your Eee PC with a virtual high resolution screen, but don't want to install Windows XP? Jaffa at the EeeUser forums has figured out a neat trick that works with the stock Xandros installation.

In a nutshell, what you need to do install a VNC server and then run a script that will open your localhost in a VNC window, allowing you to scale the resolution. Now keep in mind, the Eee PC's screen only really supports 800 x 480 pixel and lower resolutions. So there's no way to actually display a higher number of pixels. What's happening is that you're telling your VNC software that the computer it's connecting to has a higher resolution, and you'd like to see it all on your small screen.

The image above shows the Eee PC's interface at 1280 x 976 pixels, but you should be able to tweak your settings to show other virtual resolutions.

The results look pretty good, but your system might be a bit more sluggish when running this hack. For applications that aren't particularly CPU or graphics-intensive, like web browsing, this trick could work well.

[via EeeUser]

The other day I spent a few hours playing with a tool that lets you virtually display 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 resolutions on the Eee PC's 800 x 480 display. I wasn't particularly impressed with the results. First of all, the way graphics driver accomplishes this seemingly impossible feat is by removing pixels that you kind of need in order to make the screen readable. And second, the driver caused a problem that kept my Eee PC from resuming from sleep properly. So I went and uninstalled the driver.

But being a glutton for punishment, when I saw a new tool that does pretty much the same thing today, I had to try it. And I have to say, I'm mildly impressed. I mean, it's still practically impossible to read any text when your desktop is set to 1024 x 768, but EeeUser forum member kkjj's new tool is incredibly easy to use and most importantly, it doesn't cause any problems resuming from sleep. Better yet, he's working on adding support for 1000 x 600 and 1024 x 600 resolutions, which would be awesome (if they're readable).

Because the EeeUser forum thread is starting to get a little long, here are the quick steps I took to get this driver working:

1. Download and install the Asus R2H Intel graphics driver found here.
2. Reboot your computer.
3. Close the Astray.exe utility either by right-clicking on the tray icon or from the task manager.
   
4. Download and unzip kkjj's Eee PC res tool.
5. Run the utility and choose your resolution.

I don't think I'm going to wind up switching resolutions very often unless I find a way to make fonts more readable. But this time I think I'll keep the new drivers installed. While the 1024 x 768 mode is unreadable, the 800 x 600 mode is pretty usable. And while the screen looks a bit squashed (since you're taking a standard resolution and displaying it on a widescreen monitor), I would much rather be able to use 800 x 600 scaled down to my screen than have to scroll up and down to see the tops and bottoms of windows, which is how the default Asus utility.

So there's been a popular thread over at the EeeUser forum for a few weeks now about an experimental driver for Windows XP that lets you run some virtual resolutions on an Eee PC. Sure, the screen is technically only capable of displaying 800 x 480 pixels, but through some clever techniques (so clever I'm not sure I could explain them if I tried), you can sort of cram 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, or even 1280 x 1024 pixels onto that tiny little screen.

But here's the problem. You achieve this effect by skimming pixels that were used for doing things like making your fonts and icons. So while you may be able to achieve the desired goal of getting your 800 x 600 video game or 1024 x 768 web page to fit onto your screen, it won't necessarily look pretty. Or readable, for that matter.

I was in the midst of playing with the font settings to make the display as comfortable as possible when I realized two things:

1. I was getting a headache from trying to read from a squashed screen.
2. There's a bug with this driver that keeps your display from working properly when you resume from sleep. In other words, you can put your PC to sleep but when it wakes up you get to stare at a black screen.

So despite the fact that my only complaint with the Eee PC is that it's hard to view some web pages and other content on its 800 x 480 pixel screen, I went ahead and uninstalled the driver.

If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps and test this out, let me tell you one thing that saved me a lot of time and effort. Before trying to install the driver, you have to not only uninstall your current display drivers, but you need to uninstall the Asus display utility from the Control Panel. In order to do this, you should uninstall the ACPI utility. You can go ahead and reinstall it after you've loaded the new display drivers.

[via Eee User]

Well it looks like the 8-inch version of the Eee PC is real, not that we had any doubts after yesterday's keynote presentation at CES. A Chinese blogger has posted some photos of an Eee PC with an 8-inch display side by side with a 7-inch model.

As you can see from the photos, the units are pretty much identical in most ways. They're the same size and presumably the same weight. But the speakers take up a little less space and the screen is slightly larger. Unfortunately, it seems to display the same 800 x 480 pixel resolution you can find on the current generation of Eee PCs. Presumably we'll have to wait for the elusive Eee PC with an 8.9 inch display to emerge before we get to see a 1024 x 600 screen on an Eee.

[via jkkmobile]

As expected, Asus had a few things to say about the future of the Eee PC platform during the company's presentation at CES today. And as expected, WiMax is the word. Wait, is that actually a word? Anyway, Asus is playing up WiMax integration with the Eee PC and other mobile devices.

But if you ask me, the most exciting news is that Asus will launch two new models of the Eee PC during the second quarter of 2008. One will have an 8.9 inch screen, which goes along with what we'd been expecting. And there will also be a model with an 8 inch screen, which comes as a complete surprise. Each model will be WiMax ready and some or all will sport higher resolution screens with 1024 x 600 pixel displays. You know, just enough to make the early adopters really really jealous.

I kind of hope the new models cost $500+ because otherwise I'm going to be sorely tempted to pick one up.

[via jkOnTheRun, whose Kevin Toefel played a key role in today's press conference]

If there was one thing I would change about the Eee PC, I'd give it a larger display. Or at least a higher resolution display. While I remember a time when 640 x 480 pixel screens were a luxury, in today's world the Eee PC's 800 x 480 display is a bit cramped. And there are plenty of applications and web sites that just don't fit on the display.

If you're using the Xandros Linux distribution that came with the Eee PC, you can get around this to some extend by dragging large windows around the screen. All you have to do is hold the Alt key down as you left click on a window to drag it. But while Asus ships plenty of drivers and applications for users who want to install Windows XP on an Eee PC, there's no equivalent of the Alt+left click tool. You can give your Eee PC a virtual 800 x 600 screen using the provided Asus display utility which scrolls the screen up and down as you move your cursor up and down. But it's kind of annoying to always have the top or bottom of a window chopped off.

MoveMe is a handy utility that lets Windows users resize and move large windows. In fact, it's even easier to use than the Alt+left click tool because you don't need to use the touchpad at all. You can use a series of keyboard shortcuts to center a window, make it larger, smaller, wider, or more narrow. And all you have to do to nudge a window up, down, right or left is hold the Win+arrow keys. As an added bonus, Win+X will toggle the Windows taskbar on and off, freeing some space.

Update: If you're looking for a utility that's much closer to the Alt+left click feature in Xandros, you might want to check out WinShove. Like MoveMe, it sits in your system tray and eats up very little memory (about 2MB for MoveMe and about 1.7MB for WinShove). But when WinShove is running, you can move any window by holding the Alt key down and then clicking and dragging anywhere on a Window.

To launch either WinShove or MoveMe every time Windows XP boots up, just add a shortcut to the program to your Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder.

[via EeeUser Forum]

One of the first things computer savvy folks say when they look at the Eee PC is that it would be nice if it had a touch screen. That's probably because it's about the size of a UMPC and not much larger than a PDA. I'm kind of used to tapping directly on such small devices rather than using a trackpad.

Apparently it's not that hard (relatively speaking) to install a touchscreen. Jkkmobile says you can pick up a seven inch display on eBay for around $60, and replace the built display. It seems to work well with Windows XP. No word on whether there's support under Xandros, but I bet there's a driver that would work in Ubuntu or another Linux distribution.

Of course, what would really make the Eee PC a perfect UMPC would be the ability to rotate the screen and use the device in tablet mode. But a touchscreen would be a nice start.

[via jkOnTheRun]

So it turns out that not only can you use that little VGA port on the Eee PC to display an 800 x 480 desktop on an external monitor, you can go all the way up to 1280 x 1024, and possibly beyond. Since my monitor won't support resolutions higher than that, I can't promise anything.

When you plug in an external monitor you can choose to view the display just on your Eee PC, just on your external monitor, or on both screens. Then you can choose whether to display 800 x 480 pixels on both screens, or manually set your resolution. If you choose anything higher than 800 x 480, only a portion of your desktop will actually be displayed on your Eee PC. Here's a shot of Google Reader in Firefox showing how much more screen real estate you get with an external monitor:


And here's a game:


Although you could probably buy a more powerful laptop or desktop PC for $400, I'm starting to think that you really could use the Eee PC as primary computer. Just plug in a mouse, monitor, and external keyboard and you're good to go.

Oh yeah, and while support for external monitors is cool, it's also very useful. Because of the Eee PC's cramped display, some applications just don't fit very well. I've run across several programs that make it nearly impossible to edit your preferences, because several check boxes (including the "ok" or "apply" buttons) fall below the screen where you can't access them without an external display.