Article from CNET (English)

Same article from IHT

"...with sales of personal computers lagging, Via and others in the industry have been pushing the idea of the "second PC"--an inexpensive, quiet device that can take the pressure off the family computer, perhaps even breaking out of the home office and moving into the living room.

"Such a computer would make a virtue of Via's competitive disadvantage. Although other manufacturers have begun to offer Mini-ITX boards that accept its competitors' CPU's, Via so far dominates the field. With fewer transistors and slower speed, the Via generates very little heat and therefore does not necessarily need a noisy fan to keep it cool.

"'At 100 percent of what it can possibly do, it draws 23 watts of power, where my big PC draws 150,' said Dave Helander, the computer manager for the Rochester Housing Authority, who has built a computer inside a plastic gasoline can. Helander's creation and others are featured at the Web site www.mini-itx.com."

There are lots of things you can do with these boards besides make a second PC for your livingroom. We've brought a couple of them here to Costa Rica to play with. Although they haven't been deployed, we're planning on using them for wireless repeaters. The version we have runs on twelve volts only, which is perfect for battery/solar panel use. We've tried using a flash disk instead of the hard drive, which works fine. Two different versions of Linux (Debian, SuSE) work fine with all peripherals. If you like to play with hardware and need a new toy, get someone to give you one of these for the holidays.

Willy Smith reporting from Costa Rica