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11/04/2009: "eee"

In an attempt to reduce my monthly electric bill I replaced both my basement web & mail server and my primary desktop machine with a low-power Eee Box machine. This is a nice, small Intel Atom N270 based system that draws no more than 20 watts, which is low enough to keep on 24/7.

The only addition I made to the stock Eee Box was to add an extra gig of memory for a total of 2GB. And I wiped the disk and installed the latest Ubuntu 9.10 Linux release.

The server machine it was replacing was an ancient PIII 800MHz system that I had picked up from the MIT flea a couple of years ago. The 1.6 GHz Atom, though a wimpy processor by today's standards, blows the PIII out of the water. The desktop machine it replaced was a 1.6 GHz P4, which seems to be roughly equal in performance, so no loss there either.

And I'm not going to even dual-boot the Eee Box -- Windows XP runs fairly well in Sun's VirtualBox. It remains to be seen how well photo tools like PhaseOne and Paint Shop Pro will run in the VM, though.

Overall, the Eee Box is a great machine. It's small, quiet, reasonably powerful, and cost only $280, shipped. The only thing you need to add is a monitor. It does come with a cheap keyboard and mouse, which immediately went onto my junk pile.