On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 11:05:22AM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
- "Mini-laptop"
Probably the "PDA" type of thing is too tiny for my spatulate fingertips, but that's the sort of size (or somewhat bigger) which I have in mind.
You could get a 2nd hand Psion series 5mx (but they go for large amounts of dosh, I sold mine on ebay a year ago for more than i purchased it for in the first place) ok, it is only a b/w screen, but the keyboard is usuable and it uses AA batteries, I think you are limited to serial connectivity only though. Or (you didn't mention a budget) you could get a Psion netbook pro, which have a colour screen and are much larger and have built in USB, they also have pcmcia slots so I guess that you could connect a wireless lan card or ethernet.
- Headless and handless (and legless -- just a tube up the bum)
Here I'm interested in a simple small silent box with a full-scale computer inside it that doesn't need a screen or a keyboard, but will simply sit in a small corner of a shelf and be networked to others (either of a similar kind, or standard PC/laptop). And it should stay cool, preferably.
I have a mini-itx machine that is silent apart from the hard-disk (i could always get an enclosure to quieten it down or a laptop hard-disk) the only real problem with it is that it is quite slow, although this is the original model that is "only" 533Mhz but it worked very well as a small server for some time, until it just couldn't cope with running spamassassin anymore, the faster models (some have fans) would probably be much better, it has a small footprint which is good and thinking of which you could also consider the Mac-mini which is linuxable...
Adam