[OT] Cool tiny tiny PC

[Tim Watts]

Or VLANs?

[Andrew Gabriel]

There is no xHCI driver in Windows XP, so it can't talk to a USB3 port at all. Some BIOS's will detect an OS with no xHCI support and flip the port back to USB2, so the eHCI (USB2) driver will then attach. This is a function of the BIOS (Intel call it Smart Auto mode in the BIOS). If you have a system with USB3 ports, the drivers which come with the system may have an xHCI driver for Windows XP, which will then work.

USB devices are backwards compatible, but the USB port register specification never has been (USB1.1 to 2, or 2 to 3), so you need the right driver which can bind to the port, and it can then fall back if it has an older spec USB device attached.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I would be interested to know the idling power consumption.

[Huge]

Betterer and betterer. Thank you.

[Tim Watts]

I will not be able to do that sadly - I don't have a spare power meter right now.

But my guesstimate is it will be in the 10-20W region based on how warm the case gets with no fan.

[Tim Watts]

I've just emailed mini-itx back (they know their products) and asked:

How are certain mSATA cards not compatible with the BayTrain chipset - totally not working or (worse) subtle problems.

I did also give some feedback on the amount of strain the SATA cables and suggested a cable a right angled plugs (data and powwer, board end) and extra flexible data cabled would help.

I think it will be OK - the warmth will probably let the stress out of the cables and on my 4th or so go to pre-fold the wires so they lay reasonably well, it was not too hard to get the case lid on. But I come from the school of "permanent strain on connectors is bad, mmmkay?".

Bit of a Sinclair-ism - if Jetway had made the case 1/4" thicker it would have made all the difference.

[Martin Bonner]

You misunderstand the problem. A USB3 device plugged into a USB2 port on an ancient machine running an OS that doesn't know about USB3 will work fine.

The problem is that if you take a shiny new computer with a USB3 port on it, and then install an aged OS that doesn't know about USB3 driver chips, the aged OS won't be able to talk to those driver chips (and hence won't be able to talk to the port). Thus if one is selling shiny new hardware, it makes (some) sense to leave a USB2 driver chip connected to a couple of USB2 ports in order that above aged OS can still talk to something.

[Bod]

Hmm! it would be an unusual person who paid hundreds for a brand new latest Windows computer, who would then put a prehistoric system on it.

[cl]

Tim Watts wrote: [snip description of tiny PC]

I've looked at these, but they've never quite been what I want.

For a compact, basic (but 'real') PC I use RaspberryPi or BeagleBone Black.

For an efficent server box with space for disk drives etc. I've just discovered Fujitsu Esprimo, Morgan Computers have an Esprimo P910 at about £200 and it runs at an idle power consumption of abot 20 watts. Excellent NAS system, lots of space for disk drives, and being quad code I5 has lots of processing power.

[cl]

Blimey! Buy a proper PC with space for that, or buy a RaspberryPi for £25.

[meow2222]

There's no point having usb3 for things like mice, keyboard etc. So why pay the extra 2p.

NT

[cl]

No less than my full-sized Fujitsu Esprimo P910.

[Adrian]

Depends how fast you type, of course...

[Tim Watts]

I don't want a "proper PC" in my router shelf

And "Raspberry Pi" would have to be a seriously rediculous statement to make - how am I going to route 80Mbit/sec IP through a Pi plus internal

1gig?

[Bod]

Well all of my plug in devices are USB3 and my keyboard & mouse are wireless, so it would be silly to go backwards in my case. USB 3.1(I think it's named 3.1) is coming out in the near future BTW.

[Tim Watts]

That's pretty sweet. THAT might be a good candidate for real desktop use

- I have not tried hammering the Jetway hard as a desktop, but I suspect it's graphics chip is not going to be the most rapid...

[Dave Liquorice]

£200 made me look but all I can find is £329.95 inc VAT Courier Delivery £6.99 on the Morgan site.

Or "manufacturer refurbished" on eBay £315.95 delivered from seller "morgancomputers".

Reason for looking is that I have a feeling I'm going to dragged into the 21st centuary in the next month or so. Very slowly more things are not working properly under OS/2 Warp3 (patched for net access). Latest creeping disease is SSL certificates being "invalid or corupted", wasn't worried until the certificate of my ISP changed yesterday. B-(

But what ever I get must have enough grunt to run OS/2 in a VM and consume as little power as possible. My current 10+ old machine (1 GHz single core Athlon) draws about 100W, does help keep the room warm though. B-)

[cl]

I'm using one as my desktop machine, excellent so far.

[cl]

Sorry, I mis-remembered it, I bought mine for about £270 which is easy enough as you can nearly always get an extra 10% off the Morgan prices.

I run XP and Win7 in VirtualBox on my Esprimo, they whizz along.

I left OS/2 many moons ago and, after a brief foray into Win2k I moved to Linux.

[Dave Liquorice]

As I said I'm 20th centuary, Desqview was in use before OS/2 as a virtual machine multitasking enviroment. Modern VM's I know SFA about. VirtualBox is that an OS that hosts other OS's or something you run under say Win7 that then allows other OS's to run?

This machine can dual boot betwen OS/2 and WIn2k but Win2K is probably even more broke than OS/2. I have data/files going back to at least 1998 that comes from OS/2 programmes, which I'm more than happy to continue using, hence the requirement to be able to run OS/2.

I keep wandering off to look but I've yet to be won over by any linux desktop compared to Presentation Manager on OS/2. They have the annoying restrictions that the Windows desktop has. Dialogue open? You can only move or switch to a limited set of windows.