I was taking a PERL class last week when the instructor, an incurable geek, brought in this way cool pico computer, an ARTiGO. It runs Linux and is about the size of a car stereo. It has an ethernet port and four USB ports as well as an output port for your monitor. It uses a standard laptop hard drive. Awesome!
I think I will always need at least one monstrous Windows machine to be able to communicate with all of my peripherals, but my satellite computers, like the ones kids could use for their homework, could all be ARTiGOs. The cost is certainly reasonable. Frys has them for $300, sans hard drive, monitor, keyboard and mouse.
6 comments:
As a Windows user since Windows 2.0 and every version since I got an iMac last year that I integrated into my network.
Now all I use is my iMac and I really love it. Even better is the fact that with VMWare Fusion I can run Windows virtually and this isn't lame and slow emulation. I am doing Windows software development for a living using Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 which are pretty taxing programs on a system and they run fine using VMWare. Plus I can run any version of Linux I want virtually also. Mac OSX is built on UNIX and is very solid and easy to use and you can geek your geek on using the UNIX terminal. This is the best of all worlds.
Jeff, let me respond with a single char variable.
$
:-)
Why pay the extra $ for the Mac?
KT,
Not so fast! The VIA ARTiGO Pico-ITX Builder Kit A1000 does not include memory, hard drive, keyboard, mouse, or monitor.
Well for $550 you can have 1 gig of memory, an 1.8 GHz intel core 2 processor and an 80 MB drive. Its called a mac mini.
You'd be hard pressed to buy a CPU, memory and a hard drive for much less than $200. Plus you have to put it together. So the difference is less than you'd think.
Well a Mac Mini is quite affordable and can work with an existing monitor.
As for the normal price difference it can be well worth it. There are just so many positives with the Mac experience and the stability of OSX. Plus all those viruses and trojans just don't pertain. I was always quite skeptical of Mac lovers and just how much better the OS could be. But OSX is just light years better than XP and Vista. The OS is quick and responsive and the recent OS upgrade from Tiger to Leopard made the OS even faster and more capable. While Vista was more capable it was slower than XP doing the same operations.
Now as a lifetime computer geek - Commodore 64, Amiga, OS/2, and several boxes running Windows; I have never been so pleases working with an OS.
I've been enjoying adding to my machine. How hard is it to change processors, add memory or swap drives on a mini?
Well a mini is much like the ARTiGO. Pretty much what you see is what you get. Though there are plenty of guides out there from people who have hacked these machines to change components. Adding memory is easy, changing the harddrive is more difficult. Though now a days it is much smarter to just add a USB drive to add more space. There new Time Capsule is also a great option which is a Harddrive integrated with a gigabit network and 'n' router that gives you either a wired or wireless network drive.
I have built many machines over my lifetime and enjoyed doing that and one of the negatives with Apple is that there is not as much hardware flexibility as with a PC, unless you have a Mac Pro. They are such stable machines partly because of their pretty much total hardware control and earlier this year the fastest Vista notebook was actually a Macbook Pro running Vista via bootcamp. The components are certainly top notch.
I equipped my iMac with 4 gigs of ram and it sees and uses all of it. Windows can only access 3.2 gig even if you have 4 gig installed. I also have a couple of USB drives attached that I use as windows drive and the other with Time Machine. Time Machine is a great backup tool that comes with Leopard that really makes backup a no-brainer and files easily retrievable.
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