Under $200 is a tough milestone. The slug costs a $100 or so, but then you need a USB hard disk. So really you're up around $300 for a slug solution. If you want to put your paging on a memory stick for better performance, that's probably another hundred. So we're at $400 or so. And then there's still a fair bit of work to shoehorn Slim in there (either software or hardware or both). I've read that you really need the 64MB of a FAT SLUG to get decent performance out of Slim running on the slug. FAT SLUGs require you to be handy with a desoldering tool.
It might be possible to patch up a "trimserver" to shoehorn it into a slug by removing code you don't need or want, but it's a big project. Some of it is easy - remove all the plugins you don't want, stick to only one or two music formats (the different music readers are loaded dynamically only if needed). But shortly after that, it gets harder to find memory savings, harder to maintain and there are those diminishing returns. You could remove the windows specific code, but that's small. If only I could find a USB ram stick that wasn't flash memory ... in that case, it might run closer to the theoretical 400MB/S that USB 2 could do, and it would be a good swap device for the slug (anyone here old enough to remember dedicated swap devices?). In the windows area, there are these: http://www.stealthcomputer.com/littlepc.htm but even the little ones are $850 (US prices even though they're in Canada, I hate that!) with Red Hat Unix, a grand with Windoz. You can get little VIA mini-ATX systems for about half a grand, if you're in the US. For us guys in Canada, I'm having a hard time finding a source. And you still have to do the customization yourself. I gave up and bought a W2K laptop used. About $500. Runs windoz, which I know, has a keyboard and a screen already attached :-), built-in UPS. Since I already had another from the same series (Dell C610), I have interchangeability of hard disks, batteries and CD-ROM readers, etc. The other option is a buffalo linkstation. Not that easy to get here. Tigerdirect.ca claims to have them and can mail them to you. From them the linkstation is about $300 Cdn with a 250GB hard disk in it. From what I've read, the gigabit linkstations are too easy to brick, but the ones that only speak 100BaseT are better behaved. The linkstation comes with 64MB instead of the slug's 32, and it seems that's a big difference. I went by a retail store that Tiger has near my path to work, but they didn't seem to have any there (and little in the way of support staff). -- Michaelwagner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michaelwagner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=428 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19781 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
