Repairing a unique ARM netbook from 2011 — Toshiba AC-100

My long-time readers surely know how much I love unusual netbooks with exotic processors and unusual operating systems on board. One of these devices is on my desk today: the Toshiba AC-100, which was released as a netbook for internet surfing for $200 back in 2011 and was notable for running on an extremely exotic platform - the ARM chipset NVidia Tegra 2 coupled with a desktop multicontroller and Android as the OS. But here's the trouble: the device's display backlight was not working. In today's article, we will: learn the history of netbooks and how the AC-100 appeared, repair the cable with improvised means, and take a look at this wonderful beauty in practice. Interested? Then see you under the cut!

❯ Background

Perhaps we can start with who and why such an interesting device as an ARM netbook, and even on Android, was positioned for. Nowadays, no one is surprised by a laptop on a Qualcomm chipset, many well-known vendors are actively releasing their own devices on X-Elite chipsets with full-fledged Win10 For ARM on board, and Apple has been successfully using M-series chips even in top-end MacBooks for several years now.


Repairing the motherboard of the Toshiba AC-100

The reader bought it second-hand for $18.00. But here's the trouble, upon arrival it turned out that the device's backlight didn't work at all! I decided to help the subscriber and figure out what was wrong, and here's how the repair process went — let's find out together!

❯ Repairing

First, the device needs to be disassembled. To disassemble the display module, it is not necessary to completely disassemble the netbook, but I promised to show you something very interesting under its hood!


Replacing the screen on the Toshiba AC-100

Next, we see two DDR2 RAM sticks, each 256MB, forming a total of 512MB. The memory size was considered one of the main drawbacks of the AC-100, as some users thought it was insufficient. However, it is worth remembering that in those years, top tablets and smartphones had a maximum of 1GB. So, this amount is not so bad for a budget netbook, and Android 2.1 did not consume as many resources as Android 4.x, for example. Below is a Toshiba flash memory chip with a whole 32GB. I have no information on whether this is eMMC or regular NAND, but it was connected directly to the flash memory controller in the chipset and can be called an SSD. Here, the AC-100, however, was far from the first — back in 2007, the first Asus EEEPC was released, where NAND flash memory of 4GB was used.


Restoring the keyboard of the Toshiba AC-100

We reassemble the device and see that everything works fine, which means the repair procedure was successful!

❯ Getting to know each other better

In the previous article featuring the AC-100, I talked about installing Ubuntu and my experience using it on this device. However, Andrey wanted the device to remain on the official Android 2.1, so in today's article, we will look at it. Initially, the device had CyanogenMod based on Android 4.2 — but the custom firmware worked very poorly, there was no proper sleep mode, the netbook quickly discharged and heated up a lot, so it was decided to flash it to stock, fortunately, the torrent with the partition images is still available.

On the stock firmware, the device looks at least unusual. It is clear that Toshiba tweaked the launcher with their own hands, but there is still a feeling that the interface is tablet-like.


Thanks to the rather nimble Tegra 2, the device handles emulators perfectly, and thanks to the presence of a full-fledged USB port, you can easily connect gamepads and play classics. The display is of good quality, and there is also HDMI, so the device can be used for retro gaming on the go. The native battery in both my AC-100 and the hero of our article still holds up even 13 years after release, so there will be no problems with that.


Updating the firmware of the Toshiba AC-100

But there are also problems with some games. GeForce ULP was quite a fresh GPU and games were adapted for it, so in Angry Birds, for example, there are problems.

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