Tuesday February 05 2008
Mini Computers I Like Em The AOpen 965D
The computer that I have been using to serve the pages of my websites was beginning to sound a little sick. The fan for the CPU was making a noise akin to bearings grinding and the hard disk was sounding very similar as well on boot ups. The unit in question was housed in a rather huge desktop style case sitting on stand under my work desk that sometimes when I would back my chair up I would inadvertently run it into the power button and shut it down. Of course though everything was working and might of lasted for quite a while longer. Looking around my office I realize that some of my ideas about upgrading computers run more along the lines of whims than anything else. My abandoned computers now number four and are all of the Socket A variety.
The ones I currently maintain number three which include one Dell Dimension 9300 laptop that I use as home and at work because of software licensing and software issues and the need to have many work related tools available to me at home and many home related tools available to me at work. This unit has been exceptionally reliable and when people see it they often ask questions about it even though it is over two years old.
The computer I using right now is a 2.20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core flavor and really serves as my primary workstation for everything music, games, videos, taxes, bills, pictures, shopping and generally just about everything else anyone can think of. It is also the computer I use to test a lot of things that may or may not find their way onto my server. So additionally I have set it up as sort of a localized development environment running interpreters for 3 different scripting languages, a database server, and web server software. It is a dual boot system running Windows XP and Ubuntu and is constantly in a state of change from the hardware and software perspectives. This machine sees a lot of web exposure between web browsing and the applications installed on it keeping it up to date is sometimes a bit of a pain as there is really a very large amount of web aware applications running on it. It just works would be the best way I could describe it to anyone.
As I said way back up at the top of the post my computer that I use as a my server was getting a little dated and because of the whim factor I wanted to update (well actually replace) it. As I have said in the past I am by now means a tech expert but rather a hobbyist so criteria for a replacement machine might not follow any real logical path. My goals were as follows. It has to be small as the space available to me is limited. Quiet for absolute sure quiet. I want it to just sit there and do its serving thing without bothering me. Powerful? Yes powerful but in a relative sort of way. Lots of fast memory, decently fast hard drive, and reasonably fast CPU; however, I really didn't care about graphics horsepower but did want it have reasonable display prowess for when I actually do work on it directly this machine will not be running any true server OS and from time to time will accessed directly to perform certain tasks. So the AOpen 965D became my unit of choice. I configured it wiith a 200GB hard drive and 3GB DDR2 PC2-5300 RAM and a fairly fast processor. Now of course this is for the most part a 99% laptop configuration to keep the thing small and power consumption down but so far it seems up to the task of providing web, email, and database services for my domains and it is very quiet!
Above it sits nicely on a cluttered desk quietly handling tasks. So in my opinion if someone wanted a fairly powerful computer (not for games though) this unit could fit the needs of many casual users if space and noise were major concerns. It is pitched as a digital engine and one model is available with a remote control but I can't really can't speak as to how well it would perform in that arena since as it has limited graphics capabilities and I have never tried to build a computer for the whole home media management role. If there is one drawback about the unit it is that it comes at a fairly high price point for the actual amount of hardware one gets. It is however an elegant solution in the small form factor/mini PC offerings area.
The ones I currently maintain number three which include one Dell Dimension 9300 laptop that I use as home and at work because of software licensing and software issues and the need to have many work related tools available to me at home and many home related tools available to me at work. This unit has been exceptionally reliable and when people see it they often ask questions about it even though it is over two years old.
The computer I using right now is a 2.20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core flavor and really serves as my primary workstation for everything music, games, videos, taxes, bills, pictures, shopping and generally just about everything else anyone can think of. It is also the computer I use to test a lot of things that may or may not find their way onto my server. So additionally I have set it up as sort of a localized development environment running interpreters for 3 different scripting languages, a database server, and web server software. It is a dual boot system running Windows XP and Ubuntu and is constantly in a state of change from the hardware and software perspectives. This machine sees a lot of web exposure between web browsing and the applications installed on it keeping it up to date is sometimes a bit of a pain as there is really a very large amount of web aware applications running on it. It just works would be the best way I could describe it to anyone.
As I said way back up at the top of the post my computer that I use as a my server was getting a little dated and because of the whim factor I wanted to update (well actually replace) it. As I have said in the past I am by now means a tech expert but rather a hobbyist so criteria for a replacement machine might not follow any real logical path. My goals were as follows. It has to be small as the space available to me is limited. Quiet for absolute sure quiet. I want it to just sit there and do its serving thing without bothering me. Powerful? Yes powerful but in a relative sort of way. Lots of fast memory, decently fast hard drive, and reasonably fast CPU; however, I really didn't care about graphics horsepower but did want it have reasonable display prowess for when I actually do work on it directly this machine will not be running any true server OS and from time to time will accessed directly to perform certain tasks. So the AOpen 965D became my unit of choice. I configured it wiith a 200GB hard drive and 3GB DDR2 PC2-5300 RAM and a fairly fast processor. Now of course this is for the most part a 99% laptop configuration to keep the thing small and power consumption down but so far it seems up to the task of providing web, email, and database services for my domains and it is very quiet!
Above it sits nicely on a cluttered desk quietly handling tasks. So in my opinion if someone wanted a fairly powerful computer (not for games though) this unit could fit the needs of many casual users if space and noise were major concerns. It is pitched as a digital engine and one model is available with a remote control but I can't really can't speak as to how well it would perform in that arena since as it has limited graphics capabilities and I have never tried to build a computer for the whole home media management role. If there is one drawback about the unit it is that it comes at a fairly high price point for the actual amount of hardware one gets. It is however an elegant solution in the small form factor/mini PC offerings area.
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