Reviving the Hasee Q310N Notebook
Got my hands on a brand new battery for my Yingqi’s old notebook – a Hasee Q310N. After my wife’s “forceful” negotiations, this is now my main battle gear.
This notebook runs on Genuine Intel T2300 Dual Core CPU (1.66 Ghz), Intel GMA 950, 80 GB of hard disk space, and 1 GB of RAM. I upgraded the few bits that could be touched – the hard disk (basically, I swapped the original hard disk of the SL300 since my Yingqi is not known to consume that much virtual real estate… hehehe…), and the RAM (this unit is capable of up to 4 GB, but I opted to only have 2 GB. If only this baby had its own graphics card…).And of course – my favorite part: install Ubuntu Linux 8.10 as the OS.
Everything is well except the clumsy keyboard – sure, you can type on it, but man… it sucks! After a few weeks using the SL300, I feel sorry for letting it go. The keys jump around so much – you can see it bounce together with the frame of the computer. The best solution would be to put some reinforcement from behind the keyboard set – I’ve seen the technician lift it off during the RAM upgrade and I think I can experiment a little bit on it.
Performace wise – it is perfect for a road warrior like me. Using Ubuntu 8.10, everything works perfect out of the box. The footprint is smaller compared to the SL300 (well, you have a monstrous graphics card underneath that machine so you’d expect that it should have more space and vents!).
The one thing that amazes me is the battery life – I did not expect this unit to be running more than 3 hours off a single charge. Perhaps it is because of the generic ACPI that the unit uses which in turn the Linux Kernel effectively exploits. Now I can enjoy doing something on a long trip – like work on my blog, play some games, watch movies, etc.
Will be posting some more observations as time goes by. I might consider having the old battery module repaired and exchanged with good lithium cells to make my mobile fun go to six hours!