Most of you regulars know my obsession of micro-computing and small systems along with my passion for Green Technologies. Well, today's PC Spec offering brings you a Nettop, a small form factor desktop; and best of all, it's under $300 (Unless you buy Windows).
Now, this isn't the most powerful system in the world, in fact it supports up to 2GB of DDR2 laptop memory but the trade off is a system that is merely 11.8" tall x 9.5" deep x 2.6" wide... Yeh, it's the size of the boxes your games come in lol...
This system runs on a Dual Core 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor and only utilizes 65W of power. To keep the system "green" we've chosen to go with a Western Digital Green hard drive.
Specs:
Housing:
MSI Wind PC Barebone ($134.99, or less with rebate)
Memory:
CORSAIR 2GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM ($23.99)
Media Drive:
Sony Optiarc Black 24X DVD Drive ($29.99)
Hard Disk:
Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB SATA Hard Disk ($54.99)
The housing has a built in memory card reader (accessible from outside of the housing) and a built in CF card reader (which is not accessible from outside of the housing and thus requires some de-assembly). There is room for 2 SATA devices, we've chosen to recommend a DVD Drive and a Hard Disk, however you could opt for to Hard Disks or boot from one of the various memory card devices.
As for Operating System, we recommend
Ubuntu Linux or another *nix variant; however, you can install
Windows Vista Home Premium or
Windows XP Media Center 2005 (Windows 7 is another option, however it is not currently available retail).