Slashdot Mirror

Well, I just went through that exercise after researching for a few months. My goals (in order) were 100% free drivers, a significant decrease in noise and heat from my previous system, and small size. As a side benefit, I ended up completely legacy-free. Here's what I ended up with:

• Intel DG965PZ
• Intel Core2 E6600
• 4GB memory, two KVR800D2N5K2/2G kits
• WD1600AAJS 160GB HDD
• Plextor PX-755SA dual-layer DVDRW
• aOpen B200 case
• Samsung 244T 24" LCD

I would have jumped all over the P M, except there was no desktop gear for it; unless I bought a notebook PC and did some expensive hacking...

Examples:

• AOpen i915GMm-HFS motherboard
• AOpen XC Cube MZ915-M barebones
• AOpen MP915 MiniPC
• DFI 915GM-MGF motherboard
• Shuttle XPC SD11G5 barebones
• Shuttle XPC M1000 Media Center system

Tom's Hardware has a June 2005 review on the AOpen I915Gmm-HFS motherboard:

The Next Generation of Cool: AOpen's 37 Watt Pentium M Desktop PC

I would have jumped all over the P M, except there was no desktop gear for it; unless I bought a notebook PC and did some expensive hacking...

Examples:

• AOpen i915GMm-HFS motherboard
• AOpen XC Cube MZ915-M barebones
• AOpen MP915 MiniPC
• DFI 915GM-MGF motherboard
• Shuttle XPC SD11G5 barebones
• Shuttle XPC M1000 Media Center system

Tom's Hardware has a June 2005 review on the AOpen I915Gmm-HFS motherboard:

The Next Generation of Cool: AOpen's 37 Watt Pentium M Desktop PC

Honestly, what on earth are you talking about ? Name one current piece of hardware that works on a Macintosh but does not work on a PC.

Maybe the Mighty Mouse should 'just work' as a USB mouse, it's even supported by Apple under XP. Maybe the ball might not work 'just right' without some other software support ( maybe? ) but I can't think of anything else that's an external device that wouldn't work at least to some degree with a PC... maybe some USB audio devices ? Couldn't you just write drivers for those? Aren't there PC equivalents? How does Apple being on Intel make writing a Windows driver for, say, a Griffin iMic any different than it is now? BTW, I checked, and actually, the iMic supports XP... what's the hardware you're talking about that will be affected by the Mac Intel switch, exactly? I've tried, including with the example of the Mighty Mouse you've given, but they're *all* PC devices, it seems.

Plenty of PC stuff still won't really work on a Macintosh, though, just because a Macintosh isn't going to have 'legacy' stuff like RS232 parallel ports or PS/2 inputs, but anything else was ( and is ) still going to be a matter of writing supporting software- which still puts the OS with less market share at a disadvantage, no matter how easy developing for OS X is. The Intel switch doesn't change that, and for most gadget-makers it doesn't change anything, except the perception of folks like you.

All of this stuff is Mac-specific only in that it was being shown at MacWorld Expo. A ton of MacWorld Expo stuff is also PC-compatible... but that's nothing new. As for PC makers ( and others ) cribing Apple hardware design, that's nothing new, either, and I don't see how it could really get more prevalent than it already is.

Aopen Aeolus PCX6600 Passively Cooled Nvidia Geforce review

Product PAge for Aopen Aeolus pcx6600

That heat sink is huge! if you needed something low profile and didn't need the "GT" an option to consider...

e.

Someone does, but it's not cheap (Pentium M chipset) and it plays Doom 3 like a slideshow. According to Intel's datasheet, the 915GM chipset has a TDP of 6.0 watts. The chipset's GMA 900 graphics displays 2048x1536 at 85 Hz.

I cannot be the only one sick of the jet engine noise and space heater performance.

Ya know, like an Mac Mini, only with high resolution.

That Aopen board is microATX, but the Mac mini look-alike that Slashdot covered uses the same chipset, so it should display 2048x1536.

Why buy a computer based off inferior Pentium 4 technology? My last PC was a Pentium 3 933, my next one will be a dual core Pentium M.

http://usa.aopen.com/products/mb/i915GMm-HFS.htm
http://club.aopen.com.tw/news/News_ShowAnswer.aspx ?RecNo=8327

I'm not sure why anyone even considers Pentium 4 anymore; everything about it is inferior. It's like buying a Yugo over a Honda.

I would even argue the Athlon64 is a little too hot compared to the Pentium M. It is only a few watts less than the Pentium 4 for consumption and dissipation even considering slightly higher performance.

Unless you must buy a PC today, forget it. This generation is toast. Wait only 6 months and P4 will be dead and nobody will know why we even bothered.

Re, 1: My main machine is a Dron 750 on a VIA KT133; it works fine. Maybe you had a BIOS issue?

Re, 2: Did you try the external drives on other boxes? Did you try replacing the cable?

My external 250GB drive goes through a USB2 expansion card, since KT133 doesn't support USB 2.0...

I don't know about a dedicated tube amp mp3 player, but I remember seeing a motherboard a few weeks ago with tubes in the built-in sound card stuff.
Found the product page and there is quite a bit on google from pre-April 1st, so I think that one is real.
So get the motherboard and you could build your own mp3 player, although it probably won't be as portable as you might like.

Kitbash yourself a computer with an AOPEN AX4B-533 Tube motherboard (picture here).

Kitbash yourself a computer with an AOPEN AX4B-533 Tube motherboard (picture here).

Having just built four AOpen Cubes with Seagate Barracuda 120GB ATA drives, I am amazed at how quiet the systems are without any special effort.

At one stage, I was looking into building a computer with small, functional yet aesthetically pleasing case. Of all the ones I looked at the AOpen XC Cube cases seemed the best, at least in terms of aesthetics.

Use one for moving, glue the other one down and glue paddles to the buttons to make them easier to hit.

If you glued the "button" mouse to a shim to tilt it up a bit, friend could even use the wheel by rolling the heel of his hand on it. If that's still too hard, mount a larger wheel in contect with the mouse wheel and roll that instead. You can also wire up nice big buttons across the standard microswitches.

These mice have two wheels, one of which doesn't click, which makes it easier to roll a wheel without risk of accidental clicking (a bane of MS mice).

Indeed. Aopen even went so far as to make a P4 motherboard with a tube in the circuit for the onboard audio. Crazy...

How about this ?

Here's the motherboard for you, then.

AOpen's XC Cube

Some seller might ship from Hong Kong

...when you can have vacuum tubes on your motherboard?

~jeff

Link! Pictures! Specs! Joy!

that BIOS code is critical and readily flashable...

Ever had a virus that hosed your bios? You've now got a dead motherboard unless you've got a burner and some extra ROMS laying around (doesn't everyone?). Some companies have instituted an auto-switching dual bios that helps mitigate this risk, while others are jumper switchable

Still... it bothers me to have an irreversible "kill" feature on my computer... particularly since I'm error-prone like most people. Ever had a BIOS flash interrupted? I have... not pretty.

I too would expect any modem with a UART to be a hardware modem. But according to the manufacturer it's not. On that page, they call it a "software modem" which generally means winmodem.

It Just Works(tm).

However, given that my two desktop machines are both nForce2 based, I take your point. I added Radeon 9200 video cards, which has helped both reliability and performance considerably, but Apple only makes hardware that dodgy for their portable audio players.

The other point is, the screen on the 1547 is a big letdown. 1024x768 is OK for wordprocessing but for anything seriously graphical it just sucks. Also, they keyboard seems to be wearing out fast and nobody knows anything about the (apparently, I've not dismembered the thing and looked) WinBond card-reader chip in it. TANSTAAFL, I guess.

On the bright side I get well over 3 hours out of a charge and it paid for itself (AUD$1860 inc GST, 2.4GHz 512MB 40GB) in less than two months in work I did on it when otherwise I would have been idle (on transport, waiting for appointments and similar, during a power blackout, etc).

Forgive me, I just started doing a little research when I read your story. Of course I started with 'open notebook' and related searches, but I didn't find anything. Anyone know of any industry group trying to create and open standard there?

Anyhow, I'm interested in your problem for selfish reasons, family and friends have been asking me about building/upgrading existing/fixing their notebooks for years. I've dodged them this whole time because I couldn't afford one myself, but this is finally starting to change.

So, anyhow, if I where going to buy a computer today I'd look seriously at building a 'barebones' notebooks. A few familiar companies seem to be building barebones notebooks, which is basically a motherboard and graphics card wrapped up with a keyboard, LCD screen and a case. ASUS, ECS, AOpen, Arima (??) and FIC seem to sell them. I couldn't guarantee it, but I bet you'd have much better luck getting a replacement part from someone like ECS or ASUS, plus you get to pick out or upgrade things like your CPU, hard/cd/dvd drive and memory.

Here are a couple of quick links to product pages for a few of the manufacturers:

Aopen
ECS
ASUS
Arima
FIC

Most of these links came from this site, which seems to specialize in mobile computing bare bone systems and hardware. Man, is it lunch time yet?

Anyway, there are two things I know of that limit CD audio quality. One is limited bit depth - that's why they're coming out with DVD-Audio now. The other is jitter. This is a slight variation in the timing of the samples. It gives the sound a flat quality, and once it's there, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, you just need a better A-D converter. It's not such a problem with modern professional recordings, but in the early days of CDs it happened a lot, and contributed quite a bit to audiophile's poor impression of the medium.

Comparable to the DeskNote is the AOpen Deskbook 1945 ( actually, it looks much better: 1400x1050 screen, cheaper RAM, avail without CPU/HD/RAM, etc.

The absolutely hottest in onboard sound:

AOpen Tube Motherboard

It seems this has been done already by AOpen.

>I installed directX 8.1 and my direct3D is now officially hosed!!! Any ideas?

>Error msg is:
>Direct3D test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x887602eb (error code)

I had the same Problem with my Geforce4 MX and DirectX 8.xx. The Fix was kinda strange. And only works on Windows 2000 and XP, not to shure do.

Go and start Netmeeting, in there click on Desktop sharing. It will come up with a wizard go trough it all and when done, Go there agan and now select Disable Desktop sharing. Not go back to your DxDiag tool and you will see, Problem is gone. It seems that Desktop Sharing from Netmeeting is turned on at install and needs to be stopped. You can most off the time also notice this by looking at your icons. Thay will be 16Bit and not multi-color.

I'm guessing you haven't seen this:

http://club.aopen.com.tw/News/News_showAnswer_New. asp?RecNo=713&Language=English

It's a motherboard with onboard tube amplified audio.

Yes, you do.

An example of one of these boards is the A-Open AX59-Pro, which is one I've been using for quite some time. It's supposed to support processors up to 800 MHz (984 MHz, if you overclock the bus).