I spent some time over the long weekend giving my netbook a makeover. Quite some time ago I had left the unit to close to the heater in my office. Thankfully nothing happened to the unit with regards to functionality but from an aesthetic standpoint the  Averatec sticker, that is on the top of the unit, peeled off leaving the unit not looking so good.

I was not sure what to do to fix this. I could have put some stickers on the unit but I did not like that idea, painting was out of the question,  I would have bought a new display before I did that. So for the time being I left the unit as it was. A month or so ago I was going through the MSI Wind forums and came across a threat where someone made their Wind look like it had a wood finish. Basically they used contact paper to get the look. I thought that was a great idea. I did not want the wood look but maybe I could find some black contact paper so off I went to Walmart. What I found is that black is not a popular color to line your shelves with. There were plenty of bright colors and flower patterns but nothing fitting for man’s netbook. At this point I got busy with some other projects and but this aside.

Last week I decided to see of there were any changes to the thread over at the MSI forums. Luckily there were. A few other people decided to change the look of their netbooks and one person did his in carbon fiber. It was not real carbon fiber but it looked pretty good to me. So I read the thread and found that they were using vinyl graphics. This is the same material that they use on cars so it is pretty strong stuff. I decided that this is what I wanted.

My first stop was e-bay to look for the vinyl. Rvinyl had what I was looking for at a great price. I ordered a 12×24 sheet for $9.99. This should give me more than enough to do the netbook. It actually ends up giving you enough vinyl to do the cover three times. I received my order on Saturday and set off to pimp my netbook .

As you can see from the picture the top of the netbook is pretty beat up. After getting all of the dried glue off I lightly sanded the top to make sure that it was smooth. Before applying the vinyl I also cleaned the top off with a couple of alcohol pads. This is to make sure that there is nothing on the unit that would prevent the vinyl from sticking to the unit.

There are really no special tools that we used to do this. I used a razor, scissors, tape measure, cutting board, and blow dryer. the blow dryer helped make the vinyl easier to apply around the corners.

At this point we are ready to cut the vinyl. For this task I enlisted the help of my wife. She had more patience then I could ever dream of having when it comes to measuring and cutting things straight. We measured the surface that we wanted to cover and and laid out the measurements on the back of the vinyl. Remember that with a 12×24 sheet you can get three shots at doing this so lay out your measurements to take advantage of this.

Once cut we went on to applying the vinyl. The first time we tried it we went from front to back, We found that this did not work to well. We got a lot of bubbles and it was hard to get the vinyl to go down evenly. On the next attempt we went from side to side. This worked out much better because there was less vinyl to have to smooth down at one time. the vinyl is very sticky and the secret is to use two people. One to make sure that it is kept taught and at the right angle while the other is using credit card or squeegee to apply the vinyl.

Once the vinyl is down the next step is to do the corners. This is tough and you are going to want to use the blow dryer. Before applying the vinyl to the corner heat it up with the blow dryer. This will make the vinyl more mailable and allow you cover the corner properly. Even with the heat it is hard and it might take you some time to get it right. After a couple of attempts mine came out pretty good. It is not perfect but it looks a lot better then what it did.

If you attempt to do this you need to remember that you are dealing with a display and that you need to be care not to push down to hard when applying the vinyl. You risk the chance of breaking the display and that is an expense that you don’t want to incur.

While the carbon fiber look may not be for everyone it gives you an idea of how your unit might look with vinyl graphics applied. In all honesty I would never have thought to do this had it no been due to my stupidity in leaving my unit next to a heater. Also there are other alternatives such as the skins they sell for laptops. This solution is a lot cheaper and I wanted to go through the process to see if I could do it.

If you are interested in trying this on your unit you can visit the MSI Wind forums for more information. For information on the vinyl that I purchased visit Rvinyl.com