Is this Sub-$260US PC Worthwhile?

psychosis asks: "At a recent computer show, I came across an interesting bare bones system. It measures only 10.7" x 11.6" x 3.2", and includes a CD-ROM (or DVD), floppy, 2xUSB, lpt, RCA and S-video outputs, sound card, modem, and 10/100 NIC. It just needs a PPGA Celeron 300-500 CUP, RAM, and HDD. All this for about $160 as listed on pricewatch.com. A review of the (admittedly cheesy) customer comments on the first site show that someone claims to be running Linux on it. Someone else mentions the tasty idea of a car-based DVD/MP3/GPS implementation. A good friend of mine brought up a cheap clustering solution. Does anyone have any credible (i.e. not directly from a dealer!) experience with this hardware? What kernel modules do the integrated components use? If this particular one doesn't fare well with the penguin, are there similar ones that do?" And if it doesn't run Linux, how about FreeBSD or Be? I mean, if these things aren't pure crap, these would make a great small computer for the home.

Comments

Uses

[Niac]

Potential uses I see for these machines:

• IP Masq gateway
• File-Server
• Anything else you want to be discrete

IMO, these are very reasonable deal for what they are, and for what purposes they can but put to.

Re:They are pretty cool.

[bonehead]

The onboard modem is a WinModem, so Linux drivers aren't gonna be there.

The video adapter is an Intel i810, which means downloading an X server from Intel. There wasn't one included on either the Mandrake or RedHat CD's that I'm currently installing systems from.

Other than that, it's not a bad little machine.

Oh, as for the power supply question that was raised: Don't worry about it. There is NO room for expansion in these things, no ISA slots, no PCI slots. I don't believe there's even enough room for an additional hard drive. If you're gonna expand this thing, it's gonna have to be through the USB ports.

Reasonably Good

[penguinboy]

For the $160 price offered on Pricewatch, that is. $260 is certainly a rip off for a computer that has no CPU, RAM, or HR. If I needed something like this, $160 is a fair price.

Linux support for Book PC's Video and Lan

[jbridges]

Also links for:

Book PC's Intel 810i Video support under Linux or XFCom Intel 810i drivers

BookPC's Davicom LAN support under Linux

Here is someone selling it with RedHat:

TWINSON COMPUTER SERVICES - Book PC

I can't find anything on the PCNet Winmodem... not that drivers are likely outside of Win9x.

I found a review of the Book PC

[jbridges]

The Book PC's name is a bit optimistic, unless you're comparing it with a phone book. It's about 270mm wide, 300mm deep and 80mm high - 10.75 by 12 by 3.25 inches.

Book PC Review

And another link with more details:

PC Chips full color ad

Keep in mind, no slots, not ISA or PCI or PCMCIA. So unless it hooks up to USB, you are out of luck. I thought it might make a nice router, firewall, NAT thingie, but no slot, so no more network ports (unless you use some lame USB to Ethernet adapter).

Although it would make a nice little file server to drag around, just drop in a cheap 40GB IDE drive...

Re:Hmmm.....

[psychofox]

It says on the site that the graphics chip is the intel 810.

Oh for chrissakes...

[Benley]

I _distinctly_ remember an Ask Slashdot about this exact same little computer about a month ago. And the consensus was, "yep, it's cool."

Bad aura

[pyite]

Just hearing $160 for bare bones shakes my spine. We have a bunch of what seems to be similar computers at work, and none of them are without problems. We run NT which barely works on them and have physical, OS independant problems. For example: The onboard NIC sabotaged itself and rendered the TCP/IP stack useless. We put in a genuine Intel PCI NIC, and the motherboard fried that! We know it fried it because we tried again and another got fried. This is just one system but they all have similar problems. Apparently they have a none standard ethernet wiring configuration which shorted out our previously working network. They occasionally forget their IP addresses and TCP/IP ceases to work. Sometimes you have to login locally and then ping the domain controller and log back out and then back in to the network just to recognize the network. In any event, I'm sure you get the idea.

Re:Bad aura

[starslab]

Well, your something "Quite similar" can't really exist. For starters, you can't call something with a "nonstandard ethernet wiring configuration" "ethernet". You'd have to call it "fucked-upnet". Your software is fucked in the head, as ethernet drivers shouldn't (granted, only a shouldn't, not a can't) affect the IP stack.

Now for the coupe de grace : there's no expansion slots in this thing, so i'm really wondering how you dropped in a PCI NIC.

In short, you sir are FUDDING quite strongly.

I have personal experience with one of these BookPCs, as i've set one up for someone and am teaching them how to use it. Granted, i'm only using Win98 on it, and it's no steller performer, but it runs quite well. The only problem we've had with it is that they used a really crummy socket. The processor has become unseated once. And yes, the sleep has *problems*. But as I never use that, and I consider it useless for non-laptop systems, I don't really care.

And the built in modem sucks badly, as you'd expect with any "host-based" modem. I've got a real USB modem on it and it flies! The ethernet seemed to do okay, though I've never done anything stressful to it.


"Binaries may die but source code lives forever"
-- Unknown

SkyHawk
Andrew Fremantle

They are pretty cool.

[Nutzz]

Get a hold of this...my company actually bought
35 of this cute little thingies!! 5 of them have
been deployed as servers..4 on linux and 1 on NT.
I actually got them running on Redhat and Corel Linux. Everything works perfectly alrite except that there ain't no drivers for the onboard modem:)

The only problem is the power supply..donch work really well under non air-conditioned environment.
But the manufacturer has replaced them with better power supply for the new batched.

They're great for print servers

[twstdpear]

One of our clients recently came to us with a request to build a number of print servers. Since these things have such a small footprint, they're ideal for this.

We've only noted two problems with them so far. Out of the 20 or so we've built, a couple had problems with going to sleep and never waking back up (making changes to some of the BIOS settings seemed to fix this). One of them was dead, although I don't know if we received the machine that way or if the guy putting the CPU/memory into the system might have zapped it.

A couple of us suggested that they would be great Multimedia machines for home (I think that's the market they were aiming for anyway). The price is reasonable, and when equipped with a DVD, use the S-Video or composite connectors to pipe the video to your TV, and it has four-speaker stereo. With a big enough HD, rip all your CDs to it, and then listen to your music via Sonique while piping Sonique's visualizations to your TV (assuming windoze).

What about sound?

[Ledge Kindred]

with any old CPU that would fit and 64MB of RAM, this would make an awesome network-bootable MP3 player.

If Linux supports the sound chip on this weirdo thing, that is.

And anyone know if it has "line out" or just "speaker out"?

-=-=-=-=-

Hmmm.....

[god_of_the_machine]

I have some minor problems with this computer.

1) $260 price is distorted by not including CPU or hard drive. Is this a good trend? OOH.. I can sell you a computer for $60 -- but it doesn't include a CD, CPU, mobo, video adaptor, hard disk, or anything else. Oh, wait.. those are called "cases" not computers!

2) Socket 370 support only? ACK -- probably related to point #3.

3) 100W Power supply? Can anybody give me insight about how much power the required components. My guess is not much power left over to be made available to other peripherals. Good thing they support USB otherwise this would be a serious problem.

4) I didn't see much info on the video adaptor... except that it supports DVD playback (which is nice). But I wonder what it is!

Anyhow, it has good potential for a replacement for a DVD player, and as one of the first "home theatre" computers. I'm looking forward to version 2! =)

-rt-