Subject: my own mini-pc experience...
From: Clay Scott (mcfeelie@pobox.alaska.net)
Date: Sun Feb 24 2002 - 19:24:40 AKST
i figured with all of the talk about mini-pcs on the list recently, i'd
contribute my own experiences with the matter.
a friend of my family expressed an interest in having me buy or build
her a computer about a year ago. off and on since then i've kept an eye
out for the most power while maintaining a small price tag. she lives a
very minimalist life and anyone who's been in here rather large
townhouse can tell. the whole place consists of a few pieces of other
furniture and a tv. this set me into looking for a computer as small as
i could get.
after doing research on mini-pcs i settled on the shuttle spacewalker
sv24 mini-pc. this system has a flex-atx motherboard with integrated
ethernet, audio and savage4 video, one 5.25" and one 3.5" bay. i
couldn't find a review or message board thread stating whether it
supported higher than a pIII 1ghz chip, so i decided to go with that
rather than push it.
the system as i assembled it is as follows:
shuttle sv24 mini barebones [ www.shuttleonline.com/sv24.html ]
1ghz pIII
256mb ram
40gb western digital ata100 hard drive
16x atapi dvd/cdrom
ibm keyboard/usb optical mouse
kds 15" radius rad-5x lcd monitor
the system does have one pci slot. some people use it for pci 3d cards
for easily portable lan party cases. i was planning on putting an
internal 56k modem in it, but decided to leave it empty and gave her one
of my old external 56k modems (this allowed for a lot more room in the
case).
installation:
i went with win98 se since it's the latest non-nt windows cd i have
access to. i expected this to take me all weekend since i've had many a
trouble with windows and integrated hardware. gladly i actually didn't
run into any trouble except for having to run back to my place 5 times
because i kept forgetting things. booted from a boot floppy, fdisked the
drive, formatted and installed win98. using the supplied shuttle
mainboard cd all the integrated hardware worked with no problems. had
the thing up and running in the standard windows "few hours". it's very
quiet and after running over saturday night, was running quite cool.
also, these are very linux friendly. all the integrated peripherals have
working drivers. the only problem that you'll have is with running x4
with the savage4 video. drivers for that are available at
http://www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html
there's also a switching utility at the above url that says will
activate the s-video/tv out, but i can't say it works for sure.
this system is really quite impressive. she's already given me
permission to take it to a lug meeting if anyone wants any hands on
experience with one of these. just let me know if so and when and where.
the whole system will fit in my backpack.
~clay
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Sun Feb 24 2002 - 19:24:30 AKST