Going next to my TV
What a marvellous bit of kit to sit next to your flat screen TV. Wireless keyboard & mouse, and away you go.
French Linux hardware specialist Linutop has added a new member to its family of wee desktop computers based on the open source operating system. Simply dubbed the Linutop 3, the new machine incorporates a VIA C7 processor running at 1GHz. It has 1GB of DDR 2 memory, expandable to 2GB, and 2GB of solid-state storage. Not …
Paid less than that before Christmas for an Atom based desktop from Novatech. That included a 17inch Hanspree monitor and Windows XP.
Ebuyer have shifted all their remaining stock, but until recently you could pick up an Acer Revo in the Linux flavour for £160 (without monitor but with keyboard & mouse). Since that had a 160gig HDD, this looks well overpriced.
quite a reasonable price, and it is in black what more do you want.
Sure you can build stuff cheaper, and the SSD is not for all, but as a box built by someone else, and if you want an SSD it is well priced, comes with an operating system.
And no money wasted on an MS licence always a big plus.
As to second hand on ebay, duh second hand someone has already the asking price, and now wants to offload the out of date item, second hand is always cheaper there is no profit just a claw on a fraction of cost.
I got a Linutop equivalent after Liam Proven's review of it. It's just fantastic. I use it as a household server (plug USB external drives into it) and bedroom video player. It's SILENT. Gaffer over the lights and away you go. I heartily recommend a box like this to anyone. The Linutop 2 had a Geode 400MHz processor and could play full-screen video in VLC; this should do even better.
(Handy hints: remove OpenOffice, you'll never use it. Set it not to reset every reboot. Remove anything else you can.)
The killer feature: 1. It's a Linux box. 2. It's SILENT. This is brilliant and irreplaceable.