[HLUG] New small PC required

[Alan Pope]

2009/1/7 Andrew Hodgson <Andrew.Hodgson at allpay.net>:
> I am wondering if anyone could advise me a good place to get a prebuilt
> low power PC?
>

I have a Viglen MPC-L. It's a tiny (think the size of a triple CD
case), has an 80G laptop hard disk, 512MB RAM, and a ~500MHz AMD Geode
CPU. It has one 100Mb/s Ethernet port and 6 USB (2xUSB1.1, 4xUSB2.0),
display, headphone, microphone, speaker and power socket.

Costs pennies to run because it draws between 8 and 10 watts when
running "full tilt" which isn't very fast at all. I have two, one
which I use for managing torrents, and as an ssh end point, the other
will shortly be my firewall/router - with the addition of a USB to
Ethernet dongle.

The nice thing about these (compared to the linksys nslu2 for example)
is that it has a decent size standard hard disk built in, and can boot
off a USB stick with little effort. It is a little quirky in that it
needs booting with "pci=noacpi" and "pnpbios=off", but other than
that, it works fine. Mine are running Ubuntu (which they come with
pre-installed), but of course they'll run pretty much anything, albeit
a bit slowly :)

It has no fans, only the laptop drive makes any noise, which does mean
it is very quiet, but can get a little warm.

We (Ubuntu UK Podcast) got a deal on them from Viglen. They're
normally 99 quid plus VAT and delivery. We got them for 79 including
VAT and Delivery, a keyboard, mouse and 1GB memory stick. I think the
offer expired at the end of the year, but maybe you can call them to
find out.

Cheers,
Al.