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The One Laptop Per Child foundation is offering a new upgrade kit that lets you transform an XO-1 or XO-1.5 laptop into an XO-1.75. In other words, you can swap out the motherboard to replace a low power x86 chip with an even lower-power ARM-based processor.

OLPC says upgrading existing hardware is cheaper than buying all new laptops — but there’s a minimum order of 100 kits. The goal is to support large-scale deployments, not hobbyists.

The XO Laptop is a small, cheap, durable laptop designed for use in educational settings — even in locations that have little to no reliable access to electricity. The laptops feature sunlight viewable displays, dust-resistant cases, and an open source, Linux-based operating system called Sugar OS.

The first XO Laptop was released in 2007, and features a 433 MHz AMD Geode x86 processor, 256MB of RAM, and 1GB of flash storage.

In 2010 the XO-1.5 was released, with a 1 GHz VIA C7 x86 processor, up to 1GB of RAM, and 4GB of storage.

The latest model with a 1 GHz Marvell ARMADA 610 ARM processor with up to 2GB of RAM, and up to 8GB of storage. The upgrade kit lets you pretty much transform an older XO Laptop into an XO-1.75.

Additional upgrade options include extra RAM and storage, and you can opt for the new keyboard as well when you upgrade.

You can find more information about ordering upgrade kits at the OLPC website.