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Taiwanese manufacturer makes the "Zippy" keyboards that can be had for under $25 at www.directron.com and other vendors. If you happen to be in HK they cost as low as US$6 each.

Kris

At $25, it seems like a reasonably priced product.
I disagree. There are many more interesting mice that can be had for equal or less money. Mice are cheap these days.

And a *hemisphere*? Did this designer learn nothing from the awful Apple puck mouse? Mathematically simple does not mean usable.

Don't get me wrong -- I think that Microsoft's input devices are the best things in their product line, and that their traditional many-button optical mouse line isn't bad. But, frankly, this mouse is just not remotely "news for nerds".

I was thinking a lot of the same things when I saw this power supply (and that Antec's NeoPower looks like a better design, personally).

I've been a big fan of Elan Vital's power supplies for a long time (also available under an american distributor for direct purchase -- see the AMS Mercury EVR-4607 if you want a gorgeous redundant power supply for ATX cases).

They have active PFC, high efficiencies, good clean power, lots of fans, not terribly loud, and very large connectors internally (low resistance, good connections). On top of that, they're very compact. I've got a client running the above EVR-4607 very happily and another running the redundant power supply built into their S50 server case.

Sorry though, they don't glow in the dark or have windows. But the EVR-4607 does have a removable side panel to upgrade or replace its internal ciruitry.

http://www.directron.com/minibarebone1.html
I'd suggest a socket A AMD one and drop in a mobile XP 2500+ to keep it fast and cool.

C'mon...

This guy is a dumbfucker if he can't find a laptop drive less than $130.

5 seconds of googling, froogling, pricewatching, etc etc would have revlealed mutiple sources of fairly large hard drives that are larger and faster than any CF or USB stick is going to be, without the cost and disadvanteges of flash memory, and that will actually hold a Linux distro without shelling out may more hundreds OR THOUSANDS.

Mr. Submitter, you're too fucking lazy (and tight-assed)!!!!!!

cheap fan

higher quality, "quiet" fan

Hardly 50 cents. And, I doubt an IC, four mics and four small speakers would cost 25$ in parts.

You can engineer a fan with perfectly balanced blades, great bearings, and eliminate much of the mechanical noise due to vibration or friction. But what of the noise generated by the moving air itself? You can hear this clearly when you have a case full of "silent" fans, and it's every bit as annoying.

cheap fan

higher quality, "quiet" fan

Hardly 50 cents. And, I doubt an IC, four mics and four small speakers would cost 25$ in parts.

You can engineer a fan with perfectly balanced blades, great bearings, and eliminate much of the mechanical noise due to vibration or friction. But what of the noise generated by the moving air itself? You can hear this clearly when you have a case full of "silent" fans, and it's every bit as annoying.

Why? My HT PC uses a NiceTracker ACK-573 keyboard. It's an infrared PS/2 keyboard. Works just fine (with one exception I'll get to momentarily), and has the added bonus that I can program my Universal Remote from it, and use the remote for most functions that don't require me to actually be entering text. Since I run MythTV, I rarely need to enter text, and it saves me having to doink with LIRC.

The one exception to working fine is that the thing eats batteries, even when it's not in use. The solution was pretty simple: run to Radio Shack, get a pushbutton switch, drill a hole in the case and install the switch on the battery terminal. Voila, on-off capability that saves the battery.

Thermoelectric cooling is already used in computing. They're called peltiers and are generally paired with a watercooling rig for EXXXTREEEEEMMMMEEEEE cooling.

Here. You want go buy an overpriced one?

Computer Geeks

Net Seller

PC Onramp aka EPC

Directron

For comparison shopping:

Price Grabber

MySimon

$145 Fanless 600 MHz motherboard and processor
$55 12V Power converter
$25 12V Power adapter
Free (own one), otherwise ~$42 or ~$80 for 512MB, or $178 for 2.2GB if you really want to go nuts.
$20 Compact Flash to IDE adapter
$216 1GB PC2100 RAM for VIA EPIA-M
$60 Aluminium Micro-ATX case; rip out the PSU
$62 80GB Seagate Barracuda IVOptional cause if your like me you store lots of junk... (quietest 5,400/7,200 RPM disk they make), set to aggressively spin down when not accessing your p*rn, mp3, software, etc. Collection:

Total: $583
Completely silent PC: Priceless

Not the fastest server on earth, but faster than my p166 POS running Linux just fine; would completely silent (no fans) or at least it is when you're not accessing your p*rn, mp3, software, etc., collection if you go with the HDD. Only pain in the *** would be using syslinux to boot... and of course I don't know about using a RAM disk to run the system, and CF might take all the writes and rerwites over lord only knows how much use... but it's the start of an idea I've been kicking around...

Would be an interesting project though..

If you, like me, can't afford the Chenbro, try the Compucase. It's cheap, takes a whole lot of drives (I have 8 in mine with easy room for 3 more). It has 12cm fans right in front of the drives so they keep really cool. Not much noise either, provided you use quiet drives (I have 7x160MB Seagate Barracudas and a 200GB on the way).

You want a flower or a slotted radiator. Ensure the motherboard layout allows the heatsink oriented so that the openings face towards the I/O plate.

Install a big-ass 120mm, god-like cu. ft per min fan above the IO plate, and mount it with rubber fasteners, if available.

Feel free to use the low-RPM mode of the main cpu fan, because the large case fan will be doing most of the air moving (pulling it across the fins from the northbridge side of the motherboard). You can probably fashion an air hood to ensure the airflow goes only through the CPU heatsink and ditch the main CPU fan, if you're clever.

Just use slow spinning 120mm, 92mm, and 80mm fans rather than fast spinning 70mm and 40mm fans.

My microATX system runs with a 120mm fan in its ATX power supply. When idle it spins at about 1,000 RPM's. It's maximum rating is 2,000 RPM's. It self adjusts depending on load. That is less than 20db once the case is closed up.

Then I modded that same case for a 120mm fan in the front of it (from the normal 80mm fan) and I run it at 1,200 RPM's (I use a rheostat to adjust its voltage/RPM). Then I use a 92->80mm fan adapter on the cpu heatsink with a large Alpha 8045 (80x80x45mm) heatsink with copper inlay. This fan runs at about 1,000 RPM's, but it has a heat sensor on a wire that I can place anywhere. I chose to tape it to the side of the heatsink and that keeps the fan at about 1,800 RPM's under load and 1,000 RPM's idle. If you tape the thermal sensor for this fan to another area, it will run at a slower or faster rate, depending on how hot that surface gets.

Then I modded the back of the case (click on the "back view" to see it) to allow a 92mm fan in there rather than 80mm. I run it at 1,000 RPM's.

Now, every fan in a normal default factory case runs at about 2,500-4,000 RPM's by default and are only 60-80mm wide. A 120mm fan at 1,000 RPM's pushes the same amount of air (provided there is little restriction in the airflow pathway, and the shape of the finns, but on average...) as an 80mm fan running at 3,000 RPM's.

Also, using the built in fan grill in your case (the ones they just punch out small holes in a pattern the shape of 60 or 80mm fan) is the worst thing you can do, even if you are going to use default sizes. You should always dremel out the built in grill and use a standard wire grill rather than those fancy air restricting/turbulence creating grills.

Then use a 5400RPM Hard drive. If you want to blow money you can even get a heatpipe cooler for your hard drive that screws into a 5.25in bay with rubber washers, and isolates the HDD from the case. Then the heatpipes keep the drive cool. This works up to even with 10krpm drives. But I use 7200RPM's on my desktop systems.

That is the basics. On top of all this you can do even more: Rubber washers between each fan and the case to prevent oscilations. If you use 2 identical fans, don't allow them to both run at the same voltage, as they will give you a beating effect because they will never spin at EXACTLY the same rate (unless you buy expensive computer controlled fan regulators which are only available in servers). Put a rubber washer between the power supply and the back of the case before screwing it in. Then put thin padding on all the joints of the case (like where the side pannel touches the rest of the case). This will dampen the oscillations throughout the case, and regulate all oscillations to be contained in a single pannel, rather than the entire case.

There is much more you can do, but this post is getting long. You handy people should get modding. You don't have to be fancy and rice out your case with glowing lights to be a case modder. I don't, and my mods are what draws the attention when my friends compare computer systems with eachother. They just don't see how I can pack the fastest video card, the fastest CPU, and the best everything in such a small case, overclocked, and still keep it quieter than a Mac G5.

Just use slow spinning 120mm, 92mm, and 80mm fans rather than fast spinning 70mm and 40mm fans.

My microATX system runs with a 120mm fan in its ATX power supply. When idle it spins at about 1,000 RPM's. It's maximum rating is 2,000 RPM's. It self adjusts depending on load. That is less than 20db once the case is closed up.

Then I modded that same case for a 120mm fan in the front of it (from the normal 80mm fan) and I run it at 1,200 RPM's (I use a rheostat to adjust its voltage/RPM). Then I use a 92->80mm fan adapter on the cpu heatsink with a large Alpha 8045 (80x80x45mm) heatsink with copper inlay. This fan runs at about 1,000 RPM's, but it has a heat sensor on a wire that I can place anywhere. I chose to tape it to the side of the heatsink and that keeps the fan at about 1,800 RPM's under load and 1,000 RPM's idle. If you tape the thermal sensor for this fan to another area, it will run at a slower or faster rate, depending on how hot that surface gets.

Then I modded the back of the case (click on the "back view" to see it) to allow a 92mm fan in there rather than 80mm. I run it at 1,000 RPM's.

Now, every fan in a normal default factory case runs at about 2,500-4,000 RPM's by default and are only 60-80mm wide. A 120mm fan at 1,000 RPM's pushes the same amount of air (provided there is little restriction in the airflow pathway, and the shape of the finns, but on average...) as an 80mm fan running at 3,000 RPM's.

Also, using the built in fan grill in your case (the ones they just punch out small holes in a pattern the shape of 60 or 80mm fan) is the worst thing you can do, even if you are going to use default sizes. You should always dremel out the built in grill and use a standard wire grill rather than those fancy air restricting/turbulence creating grills.

Then use a 5400RPM Hard drive. If you want to blow money you can even get a heatpipe cooler for your hard drive that screws into a 5.25in bay with rubber washers, and isolates the HDD from the case. Then the heatpipes keep the drive cool. This works up to even with 10krpm drives. But I use 7200RPM's on my desktop systems.

That is the basics. On top of all this you can do even more: Rubber washers between each fan and the case to prevent oscilations. If you use 2 identical fans, don't allow them to both run at the same voltage, as they will give you a beating effect because they will never spin at EXACTLY the same rate (unless you buy expensive computer controlled fan regulators which are only available in servers). Put a rubber washer between the power supply and the back of the case before screwing it in. Then put thin padding on all the joints of the case (like where the side pannel touches the rest of the case). This will dampen the oscillations throughout the case, and regulate all oscillations to be contained in a single pannel, rather than the entire case.

There is much more you can do, but this post is getting long. You handy people should get modding. You don't have to be fancy and rice out your case with glowing lights to be a case modder. I don't, and my mods are what draws the attention when my friends compare computer systems with eachother. They just don't see how I can pack the fastest video card, the fastest CPU, and the best everything in such a small case, overclocked, and still keep it quieter than a Mac G5.

Just use slow spinning 120mm, 92mm, and 80mm fans rather than fast spinning 70mm and 40mm fans.

My microATX system runs with a 120mm fan in its ATX power supply. When idle it spins at about 1,000 RPM's. It's maximum rating is 2,000 RPM's. It self adjusts depending on load. That is less than 20db once the case is closed up.

Then I modded that same case for a 120mm fan in the front of it (from the normal 80mm fan) and I run it at 1,200 RPM's (I use a rheostat to adjust its voltage/RPM). Then I use a 92->80mm fan adapter on the cpu heatsink with a large Alpha 8045 (80x80x45mm) heatsink with copper inlay. This fan runs at about 1,000 RPM's, but it has a heat sensor on a wire that I can place anywhere. I chose to tape it to the side of the heatsink and that keeps the fan at about 1,800 RPM's under load and 1,000 RPM's idle. If you tape the thermal sensor for this fan to another area, it will run at a slower or faster rate, depending on how hot that surface gets.

Then I modded the back of the case (click on the "back view" to see it) to allow a 92mm fan in there rather than 80mm. I run it at 1,000 RPM's.

Now, every fan in a normal default factory case runs at about 2,500-4,000 RPM's by default and are only 60-80mm wide. A 120mm fan at 1,000 RPM's pushes the same amount of air (provided there is little restriction in the airflow pathway, and the shape of the finns, but on average...) as an 80mm fan running at 3,000 RPM's.

Also, using the built in fan grill in your case (the ones they just punch out small holes in a pattern the shape of 60 or 80mm fan) is the worst thing you can do, even if you are going to use default sizes. You should always dremel out the built in grill and use a standard wire grill rather than those fancy air restricting/turbulence creating grills.

Then use a 5400RPM Hard drive. If you want to blow money you can even get a heatpipe cooler for your hard drive that screws into a 5.25in bay with rubber washers, and isolates the HDD from the case. Then the heatpipes keep the drive cool. This works up to even with 10krpm drives. But I use 7200RPM's on my desktop systems.

That is the basics. On top of all this you can do even more: Rubber washers between each fan and the case to prevent oscilations. If you use 2 identical fans, don't allow them to both run at the same voltage, as they will give you a beating effect because they will never spin at EXACTLY the same rate (unless you buy expensive computer controlled fan regulators which are only available in servers). Put a rubber washer between the power supply and the back of the case before screwing it in. Then put thin padding on all the joints of the case (like where the side pannel touches the rest of the case). This will dampen the oscillations throughout the case, and regulate all oscillations to be contained in a single pannel, rather than the entire case.

There is much more you can do, but this post is getting long. You handy people should get modding. You don't have to be fancy and rice out your case with glowing lights to be a case modder. I don't, and my mods are what draws the attention when my friends compare computer systems with eachother. They just don't see how I can pack the fastest video card, the fastest CPU, and the best everything in such a small case, overclocked, and still keep it quieter than a Mac G5.

Just use slow spinning 120mm, 92mm, and 80mm fans rather than fast spinning 70mm and 40mm fans.

My microATX system runs with a 120mm fan in its ATX power supply. When idle it spins at about 1,000 RPM's. It's maximum rating is 2,000 RPM's. It self adjusts depending on load. That is less than 20db once the case is closed up.

Then I modded that same case for a 120mm fan in the front of it (from the normal 80mm fan) and I run it at 1,200 RPM's (I use a rheostat to adjust its voltage/RPM). Then I use a 92->80mm fan adapter on the cpu heatsink with a large Alpha 8045 (80x80x45mm) heatsink with copper inlay. This fan runs at about 1,000 RPM's, but it has a heat sensor on a wire that I can place anywhere. I chose to tape it to the side of the heatsink and that keeps the fan at about 1,800 RPM's under load and 1,000 RPM's idle. If you tape the thermal sensor for this fan to another area, it will run at a slower or faster rate, depending on how hot that surface gets.

Then I modded the back of the case (click on the "back view" to see it) to allow a 92mm fan in there rather than 80mm. I run it at 1,000 RPM's.

Now, every fan in a normal default factory case runs at about 2,500-4,000 RPM's by default and are only 60-80mm wide. A 120mm fan at 1,000 RPM's pushes the same amount of air (provided there is little restriction in the airflow pathway, and the shape of the finns, but on average...) as an 80mm fan running at 3,000 RPM's.

Also, using the built in fan grill in your case (the ones they just punch out small holes in a pattern the shape of 60 or 80mm fan) is the worst thing you can do, even if you are going to use default sizes. You should always dremel out the built in grill and use a standard wire grill rather than those fancy air restricting/turbulence creating grills.

Then use a 5400RPM Hard drive. If you want to blow money you can even get a heatpipe cooler for your hard drive that screws into a 5.25in bay with rubber washers, and isolates the HDD from the case. Then the heatpipes keep the drive cool. This works up to even with 10krpm drives. But I use 7200RPM's on my desktop systems.

That is the basics. On top of all this you can do even more: Rubber washers between each fan and the case to prevent oscilations. If you use 2 identical fans, don't allow them to both run at the same voltage, as they will give you a beating effect because they will never spin at EXACTLY the same rate (unless you buy expensive computer controlled fan regulators which are only available in servers). Put a rubber washer between the power supply and the back of the case before screwing it in. Then put thin padding on all the joints of the case (like where the side pannel touches the rest of the case). This will dampen the oscillations throughout the case, and regulate all oscillations to be contained in a single pannel, rather than the entire case.

There is much more you can do, but this post is getting long. You handy people should get modding. You don't have to be fancy and rice out your case with glowing lights to be a case modder. I don't, and my mods are what draws the attention when my friends compare computer systems with eachother. They just don't see how I can pack the fastest video card, the fastest CPU, and the best everything in such a small case, overclocked, and still keep it quieter than a Mac G5.

• Directron
• emusic
• Openlinx
• Philips

modem

hanger

ibm makes something that may work

caveat; the last modem i used was in my ibook.

modem

hanger

ibm makes something that may work

caveat; the last modem i used was in my ibook.

Keypad-throwing anger at missing a jump in "Ratchet and Clank"

Here's the problem, don't play the game using a keypad.

Well, three really.

I wanted a very quiet PC. I bought a huge, solid, steel case, customized with a 120mm fan on the back (theory: big and slow == quiet). I got a Zalman "flower" heatsink/fan (HSF), and mounted the big Zalman fan to blow over it. I got an Enermax power supply with a speed adjustment. It's pretty quiet; I hear a fan, but I think that's the GeForce 4 card's fan.

I wanted to make a quiet PC for my wife. I bought a Lian Li aluminum case, an Arctic Cooling HSF, and a similar Enermax power supply. No fancy 120mm fan on the back, just a standard 80mm fan, but I used a very quiet one with thermostatic control so it is very slow and quiet when the system is cool. This computer, as it turns out, is almost completely silent! Much quieter than my computer. I did use a GeForce4 MX board in her system, because it has just a passive heat sink (no cooling fan), so perhaps that explains it.

I loved working with the Lian Li case. It's a PC-60 model with USB. I also much preferred the Arctic Cooling HSF. I got my Arctic Cooling HSF form SVC.com:

http://svc.com/arcoolsupsil.html

P.S. About the quiet power supply: I got a 365 Watt power supply with two cooling fans, one with a speed control and one with a thermal control (automatically runs faster when hot). This power supply has "Active PFC", which I don't completely understand, but I gather it is a more efficient way to convert AC to DC and thus makes less waste heat. It has a 3-pin jumper to attach to the motherboard, so the motherboard can monitor the speed of the power supply's main fan, and also so that the motherboard can signal to the power supply that it wants all fans powered down for sleep mode. (I don't think either computer is ever really sleeping at the moment. I ought to play around with ACPI and get that working, but they are quiet enough that it hasn't been a priority.) I ordered the power supplies from Directron. This one isn't the exact same model but it has the same features:

http://www.directron.com/eg465axve.html

P.S. Why is it really a tale of three Athlon XPs? Because I crunched one trying to put on the HSF. With an Athlon XP, be very, very careful when putting on the HSF. You can make a very expensive mistake! I'm looking forward to Athlon64 and Opteron with a heat spreader protecting the chip.

steveha

This is what I normally carry on business trips:

1. Pick a laptop. One or the other. Don't bring both. That gets rid of one laptop, power adapter, and one external drive.

2. Get a DVD-/+RW drive in the laptop. That gets rid of the other external drive.

3. Lose the Cat5 cables. The 10' will do fine. Who cares if it's too long? It's just temporary.

4. Lose the CAT5 crossover cable and get an RJ45 crossover adapter.

5. Get rid of the SMC wireless access point and get an 802.11b PCMCIA card for your laptop.

6. Leave the external drive bay and one of the 2.5" laptop drives at home. If you're so hosed that you've gone through two hard drives, then either get another drive overnighted or just get back on the plane and come home.

In a nutshell, you're carrying way too much stuff. Make your life a lot simpler and leave some of it at home. You don't need to be prepared for every possible emergency on the road. That's what couriers, rental places, and stores are for. Seriously, when Walmart carries CAT5 cables, you just don't need to pack your luggage with them.

Don't forget that a DVI-I connector can piggyback a DVI-A, you know, analog signal that used to be a VGA.

The DVI-D digital part is what you want from your video card and being interpreted by your monitor.

That was one chunklet of information that I needed to learn in my migration to DVI.

The other important chunk of information was that The One Cool Number was no longer RAMDAC frequency. (I used to run a Viewsonic P815.)

Now you want a video card capable of high frequency TMDS to be able to drive high resolution digital monitors.

Perhaps these days more video cards can support high resolutions easily, but a couple of years ago I had to carefully look at the video cards to see if they could drive my Samsung 240T (1920x1200).

And once we're on the net, we've got the infrastructure and the processing power to really tailor advertising in a very personalized way.

So you are saying advertisers should gather information about you and track you. Are you sure you want this? I don't.

That any software ads I'd see would be for Linux or Mac software, and not Windows.

Ummm...careful there. SCO just might send you an "invoice" for the money you "owe" them for your usage of Linux, and with their "advertisers" tracking you, you'll be easy to find.

I want an "ergonomic (i.e. split) USB keyboard, with additional USB ports on the back, with plenty of multimedia keys and made by someone other than Microsoft."

That sounds like a very specific list of features. Are you sure such a keyboard even exists? Ergonomic seems more for business users, and multimedia keys for home lusers. Keyboard manufacturers may not see a big enough user base to put both features in one keyboard--at least not with all the other features you mention.

I admit I didn't look very hard, but the closest I could come were: Zippy WK801 (not ergonomic) and Kinesis Advantage Pro USB (no multimedia keys). You won't be able to find something which doesn't exist. Perhaps someday there will be a service where you can custom order a product to your specific spec, but not today.

Though there has to be some sort of product search engine similar to the one described by you, but it is probably buried in the internet. I know of a few who search by the lowest price...

I just built my first Mini-ITX based system this past weekend. I didn't go for a custom case-mod, though. Got a nice 1U Mini-ITX rackmount case that fits a laptop CDROM and a 120GB WD Caviar Special Edition hard disk just perfectly. Since this one will probably be co-located (once I get FreeBSD running properly on it) it will make a great fileserver. You don't need good onboard sound or video if you're running headless, and mine is an EPIA V8000 with an 800mhz processor and it handles FTP and Samba with ease. Nice and inexpensive to build the whole thing, too, the case was a bit pricey (overseas shipping, ouch!) and I had the hard disk and memory already. It's not a custom case-mod, so it's not much to brag about, but the Mini-ITX serves its purpose well.

Look here and here.

how about a cigarette lighter for your PC?

VICS Cooling After RD7-CA is the gimmick you need.
And have you ever wondered why beamers run their ventillators after switching off?

More and more companies are basing their business plans on taking advantage of the overclocker, gamer, case modder, or PC enthusiast who doesn't have much technical knowledge. These have slick sales literature and fancy graphics. They also may have no one at the company who knows or cares about the technical details of the product. I feel qualified to say this because, back when I was an electrical engineer, I have designed power supplies and industrial power control devices.

"Monster cables" won't give you better audio than cheap wire of the same gauge. Similarly, paying a lot of money for a power supply is very unlikely to get you any difference in computer performance, provided you buy a quality low-cost supply.

We pay $26 wholesale for our 350 Watt KingWin Kwi-350W power supplies, and they are fine. Froogle.google.com says they can be bought retail for $32. The AnandTech article discusses the Kingwin KWI-450, which they say costs $95. Why didn't they review the supply from Kingwin that is 1/3 the cost?

One guess is that the entire AnandTech article is a hidden Directron.com advertisement. Maybe Directron.com does not want you to know that you don't need to pay more, and that you will derive no benefit from giving Directron more profit.

The AnandTech article says, "Directron.com let us pick one of every new power supply off their shelves in order to put together a sample of 18 of the newer power supplies on the market right now."

The article says about the Kingwin KWI-450WABK, "We received our quad fan Kingwin supply well before the TTGI units had hit American soil. The unit was well received in the lab, but as we noticed when the TTGI units arrived, practically identical in construction. TTGI and Kingwin obtain their components from the same manufacturers in Taiwan."

"Practically identical" does NOT mean identical. Directron's 350 Watt TTGI TT-350SS is $28.99. It looks a lot like the KingWin 350 Watt supply, but is different; the TTGI supply does not have most of the labels that are on the KingWin supply, for example.

Look below at that link for what Directron says about their warranty: "Customer is responsible for returning defective products including DOA due to manufacturer unless testing is paid before shipping." DOA means "Dead on Arrival". Very clearly, Directron says that they do NOT stand behind their products.

Directron's warranty may be translated as, "If what we ship you doesn't work, tough luck, don't bother mentioning it to Directron, you are on your own, complain to the manufacturer, and pay the shipping costs to where the manufacturer is located, but we won't tell you in advance where that is, because you might buy directly from the manufacturer." Only if you pay more will Directron stand behind what they ship. So the true cost is not $28.99, unless you want to take your chances.

I suspect, and I have plenty of evidence, that when companies ask you to pay more for testing if you want a warranty from them, you get absolutely no testing. What you get is only the right to return a DOA unit to them.

Notice something else about that Directron page. The price is an image, not text, from a different server, yimg.com. Does anyone know why they do that? I don't.

There is plenty of evidence that the people at AnandTech have little technical understanding. Maybe the site makes money by doing things their advertisers want, which may be different from what is good for you.

The first page of the AnandTech article says, "We then ran several exhaustive tests on these pow

Sometimes digging around on sites like Directron is a big help when you need to jam Econo but you want quality parts in your machine. I got a power supply made by Lite-On (same company as the Gold Standard of optical drives) for Compaq for use in their servers. It is conservatively rated at 300W but has been stress-tested at 380W and didn't even break a sweat. Here's the link, sorry they don't have any more of them. $20 to purchase. I paid $10 extra to test the thing as good before they pushed it out the door. There are 6 harness wires coming out of the PS...I think this was designed for a box with a RAID.

Clickable links:

http://www.directron.com/fanless.html

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20030 712/etc_tnn500a.html

Even better: Mini USB keyboards

The case is built to house a microATX board (I'm guessing a little rework to get ITX boards in there) and a full size ATX power supply. The extra drive bays give you an upgradable path and expandability (CD/DVD to CD/DVD copy, etc.)

I dropped in a nforce2 mobo with a Zalman cooled 1.3 duron and it is quieter and cooler than my DirecTivo.

This depends on the motherboard. Some boards allow for only AGP 8X (.8v). Some can switch between 8X and 4X (.8v and 1.5v). The keying between AGP 2.0 and 3.0 is the same. Quoth Direction.com

What is .8V AGP?

.8V is the voltage requirement of new 8x AGP cards utilizing AGP specification 3.0. Motherboards supporting 8x AGP support both 1.5V AGP 2.0 compliant cards (AGP 4x) and newer .8V AGP 3.0 compliant cards (AGP 8x). The keying for AGP 3.0 cards is identical to that of AGP 2.0 cards to retain backward compatibility. A motherboard that supports 8x AGP should work fine with a 1.5V (AGP 4x video card), and a motherboard that supports 1.5V (AGP 4x) video cards should work ok with a .8V video card (AGP 8x), however in the later example the video card would only work at the fastest speed the motherboard supports (AGP 4x).

"There have been similar designs in the past, but nothing with this kind of power."

Sorry, but smaller, equally powerful machines have been quite available for a while now. Notable examples include the SaintSong Latte P4 (specs here) and the Jadetec Micropc4 just to name Pentium4-capable solutions. In cases where a slower CPU will do, even smaller options are available, such as the SaintSong Cappuccino or Espresso systems (specs here and here).

The main unifying factor of all these systems is that all claim to be the world's smallest. Currently, the title of "World's Smallest Desktop Pentium4" claimed in the article title actually belongs to the Latte (above), which has a volume of about 1951 cm^3 (although the Micropc4 comes close at 1976 cm^3). The iWill ZPC in the article is comparatively huge, at over 2613 cm^3, although Shuttle's XPC systems are over 11000 cm^3, so the iWill is certainly a small system. However, while the iWill looks to have other interesting innovations as far as minimizing temperature and noise, it fails to beat the competition in both size and performance.

There is no sig.

I forgot, don't expect one of these to run Doom 3 or UT2003. They will run office, and they will play DVDs. The earlier ones required no active cooling, it's still an extremely low power chip however.

I found the M10000 for $182 at directron, and here's what you get for your money:
VIA C3 1GHz processor
10/100 Ethernet
Firewire
TV-OUT (S-video, RCA(PAL and NTSC))
6 Channel Audio

Not a bad deal, methinks. Probably can be found cheaper, but I didn't want to look too hard.

A mini-itx project and three atx.

Don't limit your case selection based on which have filters in the front! You can always get some filters and pop them in there. This is one of the filters I have used: http://www.directron.com/cr212nd.html -- These filters are great on dust. I have filters on all of the intake fans on my PC and have had nearly no dust in there. Just remember to clean them!!

Remember one other thing, filters are only half of the equation. To really get rid of dust you need positive airflow. What this means is, you need more air flowing in than you have flowing out. (But not too much, or it will be bad for your cooling) 10-20cfm is a good amount of extra air to have blowing in. This positive airflow creates a bit of pressure in the case which helps push dust out of the case.

It really is amazing how much filters and a bit of positive airflow can help. Try it and I guarentee as dust free a case as one can get!

Well, TechTV's Kevin Rose has put CD-ROM sized PCs in Mac 5.25" bays, but that's not quite the easy access to the PC you're looking for.

There's also the i-Tee case from LOPE Computer Co., Ltd. DeviantPC has a review. So far, I only know of SpecialTech and Micro Direct offering them for sale, and they aren't in the US. I'd love to know where to get one this side of the pond. (Directron lists it as a future product.)

The i-Tee has been reported on Slashdot before.

There are color-matched components available at places like Directron. For instance, at Directron they have links to all their components in both black and silver right on the front page - DVD and CR-RW drives, stick on bezels for beige drives, both LCD & CRT monitors, all sorts of stuff :)

No, you're problem is that the PS/2 formatted the disks slightly differently. There is no difference between single-sided and double-sided disks.

I found this where they mention that PS/2 formatted disks can't be read in AT computers. You should probably dig around the web, there is probably some way to get the info off. It's not a hardware but software issue.

No, that hole designates whether it is a high density disk or not.

I searched on google for the difference between single-sided and double-sided disks and could only come up with this.

Basically, there is no difference, he should be able to use those disks in anything that will read 720K disks. Wait, here's his problem. IBM PS/2 formatted disks won't work in other types of computers...

The linked product seems more like a handheld trackpoint and really a mouse. My two cents.

Well, you can get 128MB for under $90 already, so it's going to go to 256MB pretty soon, and that's only one hop away...

What they are doing is loading an earlier version of the firmware. So it really isn't "fixing" the problem. If you follow the link in the parent post it is questionable as to the efficacy of this. As I quoted: "During reads RAID0 array made of drives with any firmware version is always slower (sometimes significantly!) than a single drive".

They are supposed to come out with Barracuda V series drive this month, and I am sure that they will be benchmarked in Raid configurations eventually by somebody. There really needs to be more benchmarking in this area.

Personally, I would say that in a single drive system they would be great as is. But if I was looking for higher performance Raid (rather than just a marginal improvement that the "new (which it isn't)" firmware provides) I would go with the samsungs. If you read some of the posts at storagereview.com some OEMS have reported installing hundreds of them without a single failed drive and swear by them. And their noise figures according to the parent article are respectable. I figure what you lose in noise (3-4 db) you gain with reliability.

If you are picky about the hard drive noise (I am) you could also try one of these. They are rated for 5400 rpm only though and make your drive run hot.

Hey, that reminds me - are there any places I can still buy a desktop-style case instead of a tower? I sort of prefer the monitor-on-top configuration on a desktop (like my old IBMs), but I couldn't find one anywhere when I was putting together my other machine.

Sure plenty.
This one looks nice. Or here's a bigger one.

Clearly he should've also built his server out of legos as well... or maybe he did. Actually its holding up pretty well. Must be on a pretty fat pipe. LEGO makes fat pipes, right?

if you still liked playing with LEGOS and it was a computer case made out of legos by Paul Rea : "I then got the idea to make the entire case out of LEGOS. I had originally intended to make the drives on stilts of LEGOS but that did not work out as well as I had hoped. Over that first month I thought of several concepts and finally decided to build the case you now see in the attached photographs" - this won the mod contest organized by directron.com.

if you still liked playing with LEGOS and it was a computer case made out of legos by Paul Rea : "I then got the idea to make the entire case out of LEGOS. I had originally intended to make the drives on stilts of LEGOS but that did not work out as well as I had hoped. Over that first month I thought of several concepts and finally decided to build the case you now see in the attached photographs" - this won the mod contest organized by directron.com.