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With an internal controller and a USB port. Neat. I guess you can hook it up to a wireless storage AP if that's your thing.

The ARAID 2000 goes for $370. 400 GB hard disks for for $355 on pricewatch. Buy a mobile rack and shove 3.2 TB in there for half the price.

Probably triple the performance as well...

Quite simple really... Just take one of these boxes, add something like This, and you have a neat inexpensive tool to control stuff around the house...

A full blown PC is overkill from a size, heat, power, and noise perspective. Please think outside the box (no pun intended :-)

While I had considered a Pentium M for my quiet system, I ended up getting a nice Socket 370 motherboard with AGP on sale and putting a 1.3GHz Celeron in it for much, much less money.

I've been trying to minimize my power usage for some time and have measured several different systems using a watts up meter. (Unfortunately filtered through my memory)

• Sony Vaio Picturebook C1VN ~12 watts
• Desktop without monitor using fanless VIA C3 ~25 watts
• DWI 7550 SBC w/ standard HD ~15 watts

I think the newer eden boards are a little bit better than the C3 in a ordinary mother board.

I think my G4 powerbook averages about ~15 watts as well. (Charging is closer to 30 watts.)

The important note is that the laptops include the LCD monitor whereas I was running the desktops headless.

Also to cut down on energy lossage with either the small desktop or the laptop try to get a DC to DC power supply. From what I've read an inverter will sap another 10 watts.

First, try BWI.com. There you can various types of boards that use the Transmeta CPUs (though Efficeon is probably not there yet). The most reasonably priced ones are made by Wincomm; but for some reason they aren't linked off BWI's main site any more. Last time I looked, I was still able to get the listing of Wincomm products by using their search function. Some projects such as the CharmIT wearable computer were based on the Boser HS-1600 board, which seems to be a popular choice. It costs something like $800-$1000. I have no idea why the things are so bloody expensive. Bear in mind that you are usually getting built-in memory and LCD controllers, video, sound, etc. It's almost a complete system. You still need a power supply, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Also, the chip is soldered to the board, so it's not a true CPU-mobo solution. Clips for the Crusoe do exist, it's just that the board makers haven't used them. I seem to recall having stumbled across one, but it was by a manufacturer that's not well known and I lost the link... Sorry. Oh, I almost forgot the best thing about BWI: They quote prices for onesies and twosies right there on the website. No need to call sales. What a refreshing approach!

The other site is All American There you can actually get Transmeta CPUs, but without a mobo to plug them into this is only of interest to you if you license the reference design from Transmeta and contract for the fabrication of your own boards. Technicly that's not nearly as daunting as it sounds. With the proper files, you can usually send these things off to be prototyped for not too much money, and of course volume production is even cheaper. It's just that the startup cost is high--licensing from Transmeta, and expensive proprietary packages to manipulate the designs if you want to customize them.

It's rather ironic that Linus is associated with a company that throws up so many barriers to hackers. And I'm saying this as someone who owns Transmeta shares and is disgusted with the way this is handled, but I'm just like the guy on teh commercial who "owns Nike". My stake is so small that nobody would listen to me. So I vent this stuff on Yahoo's finance board, and sometimes here.

The price problem with these things is usually in the cards. I know because I've been doing a lot of research online, looking for SBCs (Single Board Computers) that I could wedge into something small enough to build my holy grail: a "white box" portable.

Why not get a laptop? Because I hate the ergonomics and the form factors on laptops, and I hate the proprietary battery tech.

The most affordable card I've been able to find is made by Wincomm. Google around for it, or just check out BWI. It's still pricey $350-$450 IIRC. You can even get a fanless Transmeta version for like $100 extra dollars if you're still into that.

All of these cards are expensive when compared to PCs of comparable performance. I have several theories as to why: 1. They cater to the industrial computing and/or embedded market. When you can get them in onesies and twosies (which isn't always the case) they are going to cost more because these companies usually deal on volume with large manufacturers. 2. In some cases they are "ruggedized" and you pay for that even if you don't really need it. 3. The market is just smaller, so they have to price higher to recoup R&D costs. 4. Hefty licensing fees from chip companies (sometimes you have to pay thousands of dollars just for the rights to a reference design using their chips).

So, until somebody mass-produces the mobile equivalent of a generic MoBo for mobile CPUs, you're going to pay a premium for small form factors. Also, you would have to have better mechanical standards for connectors and add-on cards. The barriers aren't technical, just structural (as in "business structure"). There is no strong incentive for the power players to do this--yet.

At some point in the future, somebody will break through all this garbage. When they do, we could see some really exciting and affordable portable clone technology. That's what I'm searching for, and waiting for before I buy new hardware. By then, these cards should be powerful enough for non-jerky video too. They're almost there, but not quite.

For the DIY crowd, you could probably build a similar device yourself. It would not look as pretty or have quite as small dimensions -but might be close.

I fit the core of a 300MHz/128MB/15GB computer into a 6" x 4" x 1 1/2" enclosure (without battery). That core plus a 4inch LCD and some USB peripherals would meet or exceed the eightythree's specs.

The key is power consumption. The board I use only draws 5W (depending on amount of RAM). A couple of regulated camcorder batteries could power it for 10+ hrs.

Here are some of the components I used:

-Nagasaki PC104-586V ($415)
-128MB SODIMM
-15GB HDD (but note, you can get up to 60GB these days!)
-small USB ethernet
-small USB audio (better quality than on-board anyway)
-wires, leds etc
I use Sony infolithium camcorder batteries as a power source. I'm going to use a head-mounted display, so I haven't hooked up a small screen (they cost hundreds of dollars).

I hope that some of you will become interested in embedded hardware so we can improve the web's knowledgebase.