On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Simos Xenitellis <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Dianne Reuby <[email protected]> wrote: >> Is this real? >> >> http://www.commodoreusa.net/index.html >> >> A revamped C64 running Win7 or Ubuntu. > > Think of it as a modern computer in the "C64 form factor" (shape). > > Does this form factor have any technical advantages over modern desktops? > I cannot think of any technical advantages.
No, but several disadvantages. There's next to no expansion. There is a PCI slot in there but you can't use it as there's no room. It doesn't boast faster external buses such as eSATA, USB3, Firewire or Firewire 800. A CardBus slot would have been more use than that PCI or mini-PCIe one. You are stuck with the built-in keyboard. Bizarrely, it has keyboard & mouse ports - which along with the PCI slot show that this is not a purpose-designed motherboard, just a mini-ITX one in a novel case. If you spill liquid into the keyboard or something & it shorts out, you're stuffed, even an external one won't help. And the notion of an external keyboard & mouse plugged into a PC that is essentially a keyboard & mouse is rather bizarre, to my thinking. > It mentions a Core Duo CPU (instead of Atom), which means it's rather heavy > duty > instead of an eco friendly computer. Well, not really, no. The Core2 Duo is a laptop chip as well, it's not power-hungry. Meanwhile the Atom is a deeply crippled chip, massively less powerful than even the crappy crippled low-end Intel offerings such as the Celeron and "Pentium Dual Core". Atoms run something like one-quarter to one-sixth of the CPU horsepower of a Core2 Duo of the same speed. The Atom was made for netbooks - I don't think they're a good idea for any desktop device. But the Core2 is rather past it now. A Core i3 or Core i5 would have made more sense if they want to claim half-decent CPU power. Not that I would want to recommend Dell, normally, but if you want a small neat quiet computer, something like this - a Dell Zinio - makes more sense to me: http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspiron-zino-hd?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1 > The market they are looking into is those who want to revive their old > C64 memories. Absolutely. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: [email protected] • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: [email protected] Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: [email protected] • ICQ: 73187508 -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
