Eee PC 1008HA gets cracked open, ASUS' obsession with Scotch tape revealed
By Darren Murph 
posted May 28th 2009 11:42AM
posted May 28th 2009 11:42AM
posted May 28th 2009 11:42AM
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Well...the tape is on the inside so big deal there....at least the parts won't move!
So what do these guys use for thermal paste?
Human Feces?
awww thats nasty!
spread the word everyone Assus uses brown tape and Human Feces in their computers
James: No, they use Apple sauce.
Um...I would imagine screws would work a bit better.
@bigcow
The tape is holding down cables, ribbons and rubber flaps. You go ahead and drill some holes through your cables and ribbons and let me know how that goes for you.
But doesnt tape lose its adhesiveness over time? Then what?
Or maybe by the time that happens, planned obsolescence will make that a non-issue anyway.?
By that time, the insulation on the cables will likely be hardening some, and they'll hold in place on their own. That is, if this is just plain masking tape and not something a tad bit more specialized, which it probably is. The stuff in my Thinkpad looks very similar to masking tape, too, but once you remove it, it's pretty clearly not.
None of you have ever disassembled a laptop apparently, they ALL use tap to hold down the cables. It is really just used to keep the cables in place while it gets assembled, to keep the cables from getting pinched between parts during assembly. Once it is together the tape does not matter, it does not actually hold anything together.
That's what a computer would look like if my Dad put it together after reading Handyman magazine. There would also be a pile of "leftover" screws off to the left.
Son?
LOL, though I have to say the amount of tape used in computers nowadays concerns me. I saw a tech replace a hard drive in a white intel iMac the other day, and he actually took the screen out (which required peeling back about a square yard of silver tape, removing the SCREEN, and then getting the hard drive out. Then the tape had to be put back to reassemble the computer. Just seems . . . . shoddy.
Even Apple uses sticky tape. But they use a nicer looking yellow/clear tape that doesn't look so awfully cheap. Godliness is in the details . . . but I don't think the extra $1000 for a Macbook Air is worth it!
Friggin comments -- This was for Ash (And would have been a whole lot funnier if it worked).
Hahah. I'm going to vote you up anyway!
My comment was for Ash too. rrrrr . . . .
However, in a Mac it's called "the most technologically-advanced bonding strip".
OMG TAPE?????
How dare they save in production costs! There go my aspirations of a custom clear plexi chassis...
That's credit crunch for you!
Ha! i opened my one up last week to upgrade the memory!
Old news
out of curiosity, how difficult was the process of upgrading?
Can't tell from the photo sequence. Do you have to remove the battery in order to flip the CPU board over to get to the memory slot?
What wrong with tape? Almost every manufacturer uses tape in electronics (including Apple) and it's never caused any problems and usually kept major bits of wire intertwining with rather important fans.
I agree. Anyone who thinks no one should use it is just wrong. First off these are netbooks. They are low cost to start and they have to cut cost somewhere. Besides it is just holding back wires and what not. It is not like tape is being used to hold down the CPU lol.
I see no problem with this.
Many manufacturers also put tape on screws inside machines. It's all quite standard to help the thing stay together.
Agree. Anyone who has taken apart an iBook or MacBook will know that Apple heavily uses non-conductive tape (Kaptan tape is what they refer to it as, I believe) throughout the assembly. There's so much tape inside the iBook/MacBook that it is almost comical.
i test/repair the electronics on directional oil drills and we use silicon rubber and kapton tape. its yellow stuff and high temp. parts of these drills cost up to quarter a million and go through a lot worse conditions than your computer. dont worry
scotch tape is clear. that looks more like masking tape...
You wouldn't actually want scotch tape, as it's going to hold a static charge.
why is this not the first comment? I came here to say the same crap.
While the tape is inside... it's fine for me!
Where is mine?
I was told that they would start shipping on the 27th, and I preordered mine the same day that it opened for preorder, but Amazon has yet to ship or even tell me when they will ship.
Well you ordered it with the gift wrapping option and they took all of the internal tape out to wrap it.
Duct tape all the way baby.
HI!
Is that a fan I see....? Call me a fundamentalist, but the only thing on a netbook that should move is the keys and the monitor hinge... Fanless, diskless, completely solid state.
+100
dollars
Agreed. Waiting for the day I can snatch one up that's 13-14" like that. Sadly that's probably 5 years away on the affordability factor (aka sub $800).
And your wallet should move to "empty" as well..
As far as I know, the only fanless machine for sale is the VAIO P. I used to have a Panasonic Toughbook CF-T5 that was fanless (and had a 15-hour battery life to boot!).
Valorum, the MSI X-Slim X340 is available at newegg for $799. < 1" thick, 13.3" screen, and a ULV processor--not great maybe but certainly faster than Atom.
@Russ
I am typing this on a Dell Mini 9, which is also a fanless system. Its Vostro cousin, the A90, is also a fanless system.
they must have like how people used tape to hold in their modifications to the first eeepc
when in doubt....DUCK IT...or is ducktape it
Duct...
Ducttape is way too thick for laptops, and the heat would make the glue too soft probably.
My Intel-in-a-PowerMac G4 casemodded hackintosh is held together almost entirely by double sided tape and ducktape. Powersupply, cd drive, all held in place by the stuff that dreams are made of... tape!
I guess I'm the only one who doesn't care about the tape and would in fact like to know about the monitor out which is obviously not a mini VGA connector but in fact a mini displayport. Common Engadget, mind hooking it up to one of those new apple monitors and letting us know if it works? You claim in your review that its a mini VGA but you obviously did not look at the connector itself.
Engadget please.
Here are the pictures:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/images/article/inline/10793-img9753s.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mini_DisplayPort_on_Apple_MacBook.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mini-VGA.jpg
Unless your version is different from the pictures I have seen, it is a mini displayport. So will it work as one? or will it only work with vga.
One thing I did learn from my time owning an aluminum MacBook... I hate the mini DisplayPort. It's a horrible idea. Yes, I get it-- No need for all those other ports; Instead, make the consumer need to pick up a different adapter for everything, and hope like hell that the computer and video card will work with the displays via this horrible little port.
But in practice the thing sucks. I liked my MacBook, but hated the mini DisplayPort. It was horribly unfriendly to VGA, it was nitpicky with DVI displays, and to get to HDMI I needed to convert to DVI, then to HDMI, as well as running a line for audio separately. What a pain in the butt.
My new computer is an ASUS G50 series, and it has HDMI built in. I love it. No fighting, no adapters, no worries. I just plug it into the display via HDMI and I get audio AND video, as HDMI is meant to do.
Part of why I switched was that stupid mini DisplayPort. For $1300 I'd think Apple could throw us a bone and give us a damn HDMI port.
First off I'm not sure what your post has to do with mine. Displayport is way better then VGA. I have never heard anybody complain about displayport not working, works great on my brothers unibody macbook pro. Its a non proprietary standard with no licensing fees and a far superior physical connector to hdmi. hdmi works great in my home theatre and I am happy letting my 805 work with it. Wether you actually owned a unibody macbook or not. You are wrong about the adapters. http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10428&cs_id=1042802&p_id=5311&seq=1&format=2
monoprice has a variety of affordable adapters to meet your needs, including mini displayport to hdmi for $12. Good luck going from hdmi to vga, though I don't use vga myself. You will still need an adapter to go from hdmi to dvi. Displayport is the future for computers not hdmi, it is far more versatile including the ability for bidirectional auxiliary channels such as audio, usb and webcams etc..... you can read about it here:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_myth_of_an_hdmi_displayport_standoff