On Fri, March 13, 2009 10:32, Roy Britten wrote: > This morning either my monitor died or something has gone sad in the > video hardware (weird on-mobo stuff). I currently have a black screen. > > Should it be a mobo issue I'll replace the whole desktop box with > something appropriate. I'm dithering between something cheap and large, or > slightly more expensive and terribly compact (in the eee line) with an > external keyboard and monitor for desktop use. > > Leaving aside the practicalities of raw computational power, can those > with experience running Linux on the newer small form-factor netbook > thingies advise on how readily they accept external keyboard input and > (full-resolution) monitor output? >
My Aspire One has three USB sockets. You could plug in an external keyboard and mouse. It also has an external VGA socket for a monitor. They're pretty much all like that, however I have not tried a USB keyboard, mouse, or external monitor on mine. The eee box looks cute, and in fact I used to use a VIA EPIA mini-ITX mobo and case as my desktop machine, so SFF PCs are not really much different to desktops other than power consumption and fiddly parts to assemble into tiny cases. Some of the designs do compromise clock speed or processing capability to reduce power consumption, but for web surfing and word processing you're not going to notice. I will get some Linux experience from mine soon... A
