RE: Book PC TV-out/noise levels - was: Uh-Oh, look out Phil, it's a B.. B.. Bargain!

["Kevin Hawkins" <lists@xxxxxxx>]

I have one too - the build quality as Patrick says seems very good but I must admit I am on my fourth unit. This is not as bad as it sounds - let me expand.

 

    1) Unit one - no video out after installing CPU, memory etc - unit appeared dead.

    2) Swapped for unit 2 which when powered up in shop the PSU was dead.

    3) Unit 3 when unpacked in shop the cmos battery was missing and the retaining clip for the battery broken.

    4) Unit 4 appeared like unit 1) however I took it back again and in store they put their own CPU in which worked - we then swapped my CPU back which worked - very strange. I suspect unit 1 worked all the time. Mark McCall had a similar experience to this.

 

    Overall I am very pleased with the Book PC and I don't regard them as low quality, I think I was just unlucky. They are noisier than I had hoped but not too bad , much quieter than my other PC but not in the consumer entertainment appliance class of say a Tivo.

 

    There are two different motherboard design used.. In one the CPU is under the floppy and the RAM close to where the hard disk sits. In the second the CPU is nearer the rear of the case 'in the open' and the RAM at the side of the box. The latter seems to be better in that you can fit a larger fan to the CPU if needed, however the supplied fan works fine on my CPU (850 Mhz Celeron).

 

    One minor niggle is that the bezel is poorly designed, the led on the DVD Rom drive is obscued /in the wrong place for the clear plastic lens which means you can't see the light and the floppy recess is too deep which makes it awkward to insert diskettes, my only wish is that it could have had USB 2.0 rather than 1.1 as that would have provided a path to get high bandwidth data into the unit, eg video, as it has no slots. The 100Mbit ethernet is still there of course though but low cost/ easy video digitisers tend to be USB

 

    Yes - I would buy another, in fact I may.

 

    Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: PatrickLidstone [mailto:patrickl@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 06 January 2002 10:53
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxxSubject: [ukha_d] Book PC TV-out/noise levels - was: Uh-Oh, look out Phil, it's a B.. B.. Bargain!

> Did I miss a reply on this, I can't find one... I see they are
still
> on sale at £199 so I am tempted to get one.. how have people been
> getting on with them.. any good? Any problems??

Nicely put together, totally rock solid so far, with decent
performance, but definitely not silent running - perhaps marginally
quieter than your average PC?

> From the Maplin page it implies the TV out is attached to the DVD
> drive only, but from your note Paul it implies it is Tv out for
whole
> PC.

Installed Linux on mine, and was very pleasantly surprised to find
that TV-out works straight out of the box for the whole PC.
Additional driver disk is supplied for tv-out with various flavours
of Windows too.

Only other thing to watch is that the two memory slots take a maximum
of 256k DIMM per slot. Oh, and the Maplin blurb says you need to add
your own CPU fan. You don't - there's one slung in the box.

Patrick



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