How to dismount MSI PR201

Today I'm starting a new serie of posts regarding laptop modding. The first step of every laptop modding is of course the notebook dismount. The tools required are very common: a small screw driver, better if magnetic, a pair of tweezers, a plastic blade (maybe a plastic knife or plettrum) and the most important of course patience and care.

Remove Openoffice start delay

Hey,

even if in many setups this trouble it's silent in fast environment it's really a pain. I'm talking about the slow startup of Openoffice when you want to open a file. It takes ages to do nothing, as it doesn't write or read from drive, no CPU use or whatever. It took a lot to figure out where the trouble was. From time to time it happened to do some text edit without internet connection... and surprise... no problem!

Speedup Desktop Environment

Hey,

one of the last post I was wondering what made my system idle for 3 sec before finishing boot. I think I've found. I asked Sherlock Holmes and he revealed me the truth. So let's take the chance and find the best way to get a responsive and fast environment.

First of all unless you have a good dedicated graphic card I suggest to forget about compiz and other beautiful but useless beautifiers. I even suggest Xfce which is very light fast and reliable. This means that Gnome and KDE are good if you want a cool look, but not always the best choice.

In my case I have an Integrated Intel Graphics, so I have to do without compiz, I love very minimalist desktops, so decided to do without compiz, without KDE and without Gnome, just Xfce, and an even lighter panel manager, tint2.

CPU downvoltage, downclock and monitoring on gentoo linux

Hey everybody,

since I assembled my laptop starting from spare parts I had a serious problem: heat. I don't mean my laptop went on fire in idle, but when doing some serious computing form my MRI jobs, it happens to work for several minutes with both CPU at 100%.  That should not scare anybody, but I did force my barebone specs plugging a T9800 CPU, 35W, when the suggested CPU was of downvolted family (25W). Hehe :]. Obviously you can solve many overheating troubles, but the first solution should always be heatsink cleaning and fan check.

Keeping in mind that I always run my pc with the best airflow possible (no pc-bag under it or cover while sitting on the bed etc.), this is how I solved my problem, handling the CPU management in the same time, and how I tested the final configuration.

MSI PR201 and linux: bluetooth, fingerprint, Intel video, Intel audio and card reader

Hi everybody,

today I'm going to write about some tricks to fully handle MSI PR201 features. As comes out of the title we are going to treat 5 main areas: bluetooth dongle, fingerprint sensor, Intel Graphics, Intel audio and MSI PR201 is a small but complete notebook, it comes in a small and lightweight chassis, with a 12" screen. It has a Montevina chipset, so it won't support latest Intel processors (i5, i7 etc), but can run up to the T9900 or X9100 with 3,1GHz clock. The ram supported is DDR2 up to 8GB. Our hardware is going to be:

Device 002: ID 0db0:a97a Micro Star International Bluetooth EDR Device
Device 002: ID 147e:1000 Upek (fingerprint sensor)
VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller
?? Card Reader ??