More and more notebooks and netbooks are getting multitouch-capable touchpads, but if you’re chugging away with your existing machine and you want some straightforward multi-directional scrolling then you may need to take things into your own hands.  As you can see from the newly-acquired nubbin in the right palm-rest on this Eee PC 901, modder Dave Astolfo decided to extract the trackball from an Apple Mighty Mouse and implant it into his netbook.

Video demo after the cut

As you might expect given the compact internal dimensions of the 8.9-inch netbook, squeezing in not only the trackball itself but the main-board from the mouse proved a challenge.  The overall process apparently took around two hours, and involved de-soldering and re-soldering various parts to each other.

Frustratingly, the end result only actually scrolls vertically; the Windows XP drivers don’t support horizontal movement.  According to Dave, there are some third-party drivers (unfortunately not free) which enable this functionality.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[via EEE-PC.de]

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Mighty Mouse donates ball to Eee PC 901 [Video]