Hi. For those who don't know the 7 is for 7 inch screen (800x400) and the SD is for solid disk in this case 8 Gig. Our local Staples store were selling off 2 units. One in black with no power unit was the cheapest so I took a gamble on it. 9.5v at 2.5A should not be hard to organise I thought. But back at the office I discovered the books and the unit do not even indicate which way round the the power connects. Well for the price I reckoned I ought to have a spare ;-) The other unit is in white and had a power unit with it for a little more. 2 netbooks for a shade over ?200 is not a bad deal. Both units are the Linux version and were the display models so had been set up and messed with. When I did the updates I got disk full messages. By email Asus sent info on how to sort that but it is a bit of a fiddle and involves playing with partitions whilst booted from a memory stick. The Linux is Xandros and the first partition is read only and updates are done on the second partition and the first is marked ....... So I having googled a bit I decided to put the Ubuntu netbook remix on one machine. The other I have done a factory reset on and only done the most critical updates so I can at least have play with the Xandros.
I guess the ability to restore to factory conditions is the price paid for the read only partition. The point of this mail is to say I have just loaded the npa binary from Dave's site and hamlib via synaptic and the little box is happily reading a DL station via the internal mic with appropriately a 3 foot air gap. The set-up screen is behind the main screen and I can't get it to the fore but as I said I just downloaded and started it in the normal way. Oddly they will not boot my Puppy usb stick but that may just be because they only see the first partition which was left as a small FAT to allow use on a work machine. But I have another stick to play with so I should have puppy running as well. So that's another Linux set up to test with. And a more portable system to take out with the FT817. Not must technical stuff to get you teeth into I know. BTW the 701SD has external monitor 3 usb ports Lan and wireless, plus mic and phones sockets as well as built in mic and webcam. So in an emergency use web-cam to take picture an send it back to base is possible as the unit is so small. Or use another camera and transfer via the built in SD slot. It's one step nearer to fldigi on my windows 6 had held device ;-) 73 Roger G6CKR
