Many of us have a decent TV, perhaps as mine does, with a VGA cable attached to it. I have sometimes attached a laptop to the screen in order to lead Advent, Lent or Confirmation Courses; however, it is a bit messy with the cabling and it gets poor WiFi reception and so it has in the past been less than satisfactory.
My Churchwarden told me about this little box: a desktop version of the Asus eeePc known as the eeeBox.
I saw them in Novatech today and I have to say, I am most impressed
For under £200 you get a PC perfect for school, youth club or the lounge – connect a wireless keyboard and mouse and you have complete browsing from the sofa, although I imagine that you’d want to increase the font size on even an LCD TV as the distance from the screen to the sofa is considerably more than desk to monitor normally…
It is practically silent, has a 160Gb hard disk, Windows XP or for more quick and dirty browses, the SplashTop embedded OS (a very light Linux up and running in 10 seconds) featuring a Firefox browser supporting YouTube flv video (so must have a decent flash bundled with it). Power on to web in 10 secs, very impressive. It uses the Intel Atom chip, so although I won’t be crunching video on it, I can browse to my hearts desire. I do all my email, and blog RSSing on Google these days, so browser is all I need. The WiFi is more powerful than my laptop, and so reception is better and it does have gigabit Ethernet as well.
There is an SD memory card slot on the front, ideal for my camera and 4 USB ports in total, two at back and 2 in front; audio and mic in front and a speaker out back. The video output is DVI, and a VGA adapter is supplied. I could push the resolution up to 1280 x 900, but as I said, I would want a lower resolution to make the fonts bigger when I sit lounging on the sofa.
A wired keyboard and mouse are supplied. It is the complete kit. You just need that TV or big LCD monitor… It even has a mounting kit to fix to the VESA holes at the back of a monitor to completely hide it.
I can see this saving space and increasing performance at the youth club; if I restricted it to SplashTop then they would be limited in what they could hack on the OS at youth club.
£200 makes it a very good value PC, clearly not the fastest available, but if you have a budget and do most of your work on the net, then this is ideal.
Oh, and it looks cool as well…