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I have had one (512MB USB 2.0) for about 6 months now. No problems whatsoever. The driver built into XP work seamlessly. Mac OS X 10.3.x also recognizes it out of the box. I don't know about 2K, but in 98 I just downloaded the driver from the website, installed, and it worked flawlessly. Never had a problem. The credit card size plastic carrying case is a great way to transport it, too.

I have been recommending it to others and have yet to hear a complaint.

.

Um, this stuff is totally unnecessary. There is one existing format -- USB 2.0. The market has even produced a USB flash memory device small enough for any handheld device: PQI 1GB Intelligent Stick. Say goodbye to adapters and let's have the manufacturers use this as the new standard. USB is the answer. We don't need YAS.

btw: somewhat wrong. apple keyboard costs 29.00 [-student discount 26.00] and includes the very neccesary usb hub. bluetooth not actually required get your facts straight.

Buy a mounse at office depot for $10 (or $14 NOW, I guess here,
or your local computer retailer. Compare to base-line dell offering with intel extreme graphics, intel celeron CPU, etc.

mac mini still plays ut2005 without lag, only slightly jumpy running @ 800x600 32bit etc, etc.

This competes with any base-lline x86 system very well.

I like that I can pick My display or buy the apple dvi to rca connector and use my TV. you won't see that sort of a thing on a pc either, nor at that form factor sie, quality, etc.

I'm debating on putting a second card into the box and seeing what happens... I wonder if it could handle the load?

I'm debating on putting a second card into the box and seeing what happens... I wonder if it could handle the load?

Nice cheap supplier of Nero if it comes up again:

http://www.softwareandstuff.com/otherutiltbl.html# 4239

Monitors. You can get pantsed a couple of ways here.

that was NOT a joke... I'm imagining you in your bell-bottom pants, platform soles, and a stack of pristene 720kb floppies.
I said iPod, but you may interpret that as any usb/usb2/firewire device that may be used as a hard drive. A small usb (pen) drive is only slightly larger than the usb connector itself, and costs about the same as a floppy drive.
if you are using a computer without at least a single usb 1.1 connection, you probably should accept that you have fallen desperately behind the times.

It doesn't have Bluetooth (it uses IR instead), but this is the keyboard I use with my HTPC (MythTV):
Parex Wireless Multimedia Keyboard w/ Intellipoint Mouse

According to the website, they're sold out, but it might be available somewhere else. It works great (across the room for me, although my living room isn't that large), and it doesn't conflict with the Hauppauge IR receiver either (though it definitely will conflict with an irman, and maybe others, so be forewarned). It doesn't require direct line of sight, it will work on up to a 70 degree angle (if I remember the manufacturer's specs correctly). And, it was only $20 at the time.

Otherwise, I've heard that the Gyration products are great, but again, they're not Bluetooth, they're RF.

-- Joe

Funny you should mention it, but I spent the last few evenings undoing that mistake.

Split your requirements into two computers. One should be a devoted gateway. It should do any routing, NATing (if you do that sort of thing), firewalling, traffic shaping, DNS, DHCP, etc., everything associated with "getting the Internet into my residence". Maybe email fits in as well. If you want, you can even put Squid on it. I got a box that is perfect for this for about $105 (after shipping). Just add a second NIC (everything else is included). Maybe a bit of overkill (400 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 6 GB HDD), but hey, it was cheap. Not as small as the IWill, but since I tend to not mess with my router much, it doesn't really need to be any smaller than it is.

Then have second machine -- perhaps the one referenced in this article -- for everything else. Forward port 80 to it so your web sites appear to come from the main system. Forward port 2222 to 22 so that you can SSH into it from the outside world. Put samba, MySQL, XFree, etc. on it.

The point of this is, put the stuff that you simply set up and forget on one machine. Make it dedicated to its purpose of handling the network needs for your residence. Then for everything else, use one or more other machines. Then, if you crash or screw up or whatever the one machine, you haven't taken down your whole local network. You don't have to worry about accidentally messing up your firewall config, since it is on a box that you never touch. You still get a web (and any other) server that appears to be directly exposed, but you can mess with the web server configuration without risking messing with your whole network. Finally, you can disconnect and take off with your secondary server without messing anything up. Before I split the job over two computers, I wanted to take my computer somewhere else for a few days. But I couldn't -- taking it would take the network down. And to make my routing computer work properly in the new environment, I would have to reconfigure it. And then I would have to configure it again to get it back up and running once I put it back to work as a router. Now, I can just unplug the secondary computer. It is already set up to use DHCP, and it doesn't expect to act as a router, so no reconfiguration. And the network at home stays up -- the web server is gone, but that is all.

Anyway, my suggestion is to give permanent services a permanent, stable home. Give the dynamic services and the stuff you will play with a separate box. Kind of like the kernel-space, userland separation that makes an OS stable...

Why you gotta lie to make friends? :)

It's x86 hardware, but it's powered through the video card. Looks pretty good at 800x600 too (it's a TFT display).

Unisys 10.5" LCD Monitor w/ 2MB PCI Video Card

It says 2MB video card, but the one I got was a 4MB video card. It happily supports dual displays with Windows 9x and higher, but it doesn't support video playback, so scrap the idea of getting it to watch TV or play movies on. But for what you're describing, a small monitor for a low-power system, I think this would be ideal.

Sadly, they don't have a Linux driver for the required 65550 video card, but there's always Google and the price is right.

15 inch for $215, if that's what he really wants.

17 inch start at $333

The above 18 inch for $444 is a great price.

19 inch start at $590

4 Pack 47GB SCSI for $149.95 times 7 = $1049.65 for 1.316TB storage. These are full height drives that weigh 7# each. That is 196# of hard drives.

I've used the C3 666 processor, and it played all movies I've thrown at it (DivX, MPEG-2, DVD, whatever).

Perhaps you had a video problem in that machine?

Well as quite a few people probably know, its today possible to build a PC for $199 if you get the right components.

It can be fun to build your own computer, once you know how. It isn't too hard, once you know how. It can be impressive, to those who haven't tried it themselves. I've built quite a few myself, over the years.

But I no longer try do so. Why? Because I can't save money doing so. I keep an eye on prices, and I can't build one for as cheap as my local clone shops. I can't build one as cheap, even if count the value of my labour at $0 per hour. So, I am going to buy a clone next time, at a place where they look clueful.

A friend of mine isn't convinced by this argument. She has started to build computers for her friends. So far she is doing for fun, and love, and is only charging for the parts. (But she thinks she could be making a profit, if she just got her volume up a couple of hundred percent.) And sometimes her buddies bring them back. I am cruel. When she asks for my advice, I tell her. "Just take it back to the manufacturer, and let them worry about it."

You can buy a brand new $199 PC (Yeah yeah minus the monitor) from this place and website...

Worth noting that while these computers may be "new", they are not really comparable to other new computers. Here in Toronto the slowest new computers are all 1 gigahertz. The computer you pointed uses a motherboard that maxes out at only 800 megahertz. Why is that? It is an old motherboard -- released in June 1999. Is it really fair to call it a "new" computer if it uses such an old motherboard? This motherboard is the old AT form factor version, not an ATX form factor.

Its a very decent configuration with an ASUS motherboard and can be easily upgraded later to a higher speed Pentium III CPU...

Okay, I just did a google search on this motherboard. It got some okay reviews, and some crappy ones. Here is the .pdf version of the manual. FWIW the manual doesn't say a word about mounting a Pentium III. Maybe the ability to mount a socket 370 Celeron implies that? I wouldn't know. I have stuck with AMD processors the last five or six years.

Well as quite a few people probably know, its today possible to build a PC for $199 if you get the right components. And it looks like some enterprising souls have already done that. You can buy a brand new $199 PC (Yeah yeah minus the monitor) from this place and website - http://www.softwareandstuff.com/h_dsk_asusme99700. html
Of course this one doesn't come with an OS but hey there are so many alternatives for that. Its a very decent configuration with an ASUS motherboard and can be easily upgraded later to a higher speed Pentium III CPU and you can also disable the onboard video card and add a better one. Though only PCI video card is possible but you can easily add a cheap PCI version of nVidia GeForce MX cards. All in all pretty good for the price. And if you happen to live in the Bay Area you can drive up to the shop and check it out for yourself before buying it. I intend to see if it is really that well built as it sounds.

Wait till some geek gone mad puts one of these in a pillow case and attacks the agents who come to arrest him or even beats a politi^H^H^H^H^H^H to death and get life instead of getting life for hacking hotmail.

I intended this reply to be a simple enthusiastic endorsement of Corel Office 2000 for Linux. CO2K came out in April 2000, noted in /. at the time, and I've been using it extensively since then, including frequent Save As .xls and .doc functions, which worked as expected.

Downsides, noted here last April are that CO2K uses it's own proprietary version of WINE, which performs about as sluggishly as a M$ product, and that it's commercial software, which many Linux users object to for religious reasons. Despite these complaints, which are true, CO2K is the strongly preferred choice of suite here, and it also has the advantage of name-recognition and loyalty among large numbers of users with administrative of clerical backgrounds.

I had intended to conclude by quickly mentioning the price, which is a lot lower than billyware. This is the point where the morning took a disturbing and Orwellian turn.

Corel Office for Linux has been withdrawn from the Corel website. Not only has the product itself no longer being offered for sale, but the entire support section is deleted, although the newsgroup corel.wpoffice.office2000-linux is intact.

Using the message threads as my only available source of information [This was announced nowhere] I gather the product was withdrawn sometime around the beginning of this month. Corel Support is quoted in one of the threads saying it's been "obsoleted".

http://www.softwareandstuff.com still have it listed as available for order at a price of $49 USD, but if you're interested pursuing this direction, act quickly.