SFF 'nettop' PCs

[themadhippy]

I had a hell of a job getting XP onto my Revo, for some reason it just wouldn't see the partitions to boot into

Don't want to go too computerish but could it be something to do with xp's dislike of sata drives?

[norty303]

Could be. In case it is a common problem, here's the link to the full saga including fix

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9565

[tvi675]

Hopefully my touch screen will be arriving today, so I shall soon be able to report on my system! Rather than XP I decided to go down the Windows 7 route. Haven't tried installing it yet but I figured given that it's an OS which is supposed to be suited to touch systems, might as well give it a go!

 

And, at risk of turning this into something where we show off gratuitous pictures of our MagicQ systems, I'd be interested to see how people have cased up similar setups!

 

Matt

[ChrisBogg]

I will second the Eee box for magic q. I use it in the front room and it happily runs lighting cues all day over several artnet universes. I only use it with one screen, (my LCD tv). I found having the in built UPS is a good feature as it means it buys me time to plug it back in when my wife unplugs everything to vaccuum.

 

Hth!

 

Dunc

 

 

 

In built UPS are you thinking of the eee box or something else!

 

Chris

[dunk]

Did I miss something?!

[dirkenstein]

OK- so I bit the bullet and bought a Revo 3600 off eBuyer last week - couldn't justify the extra money for the LinITX solution or the eee Box.

 

Here's a little review.

 

The Good

 

1. The Revo is definitely fast enough and has more than enough disk space (160GB) and RAM (1GB) to handle MagicQ + any other normal office apps you might need during a get-in (PDF viewing, spreadsheet, word processor). I'm not sure it would perform particularly well for visualization or similar purposes. I wonder how well it would work as a mini video server.

 

2. The Revo 3600 has working dual-monitor support under XP, so you can have a main screen on the HDMI interface and a view outputs/supplementary information screen on the VGA interface. You will need a monitor with HDMI or DVI-d support to use the HDMI interface (obviously).

 

3. It has 6 USB ports, enough for keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, magicq wing, and USB backup stick, with a spare for external drives, UPS monitoring, numeric keypad, or whatever else.

 

4. The odd lozenge shape seems awkward until the unit is mounted on the back of a monitor in the intended orientation (with one corner pointing up vertically). Then all the switches and USB ports wind up in sensible places.

 

The Bad

 

1. The splashtop linux distro preinstalled on it doesn't appear to be usable for anything except web browsing, Skype and listening to mp3s. I couldn't even figure out how to look at files on a USB stick, let alone get a bash prompt. No idea if ctrl+alt+Fx would have worked.

 

2. Installing XP on the Revo is a little bit hairy. I resorted to the following:

a) A USB CD drive - alternative methods build a bootable XP 'slipstreamed' install on a usb stick. That seems to be quite involved.

b) A USB floppy containing the extracted NVIDIA SATA drivers. I'm not sure they were strictly necessary in the end, but may have been needed to get XP installer to work even after AHCI was disabled. You may need to add these in using F6 during the XP install process.

c) You must disable RevoBoot and AHCI support for the SATA interface in the set-up/integrated peripherals menu, and switch it to standard IDE. XP does not like AHCI.

d) Even though XP would install in a partition in free space after I disabled AHCI, the system would not boot into XP afterwards. I had to delete all the shipped recovery/install partitions and everything else and then reinstall XP. After that it worked fine.

e) Acer does not make XP drivers available for this system. Getting hold of the right drivers for graphics, motherboard and wired networking is easy- the generic NVIDIA Ion ones from the NVIDIA website work fine. Getting hold of the right drivers for built-in sound and for the wireless network card is slightly frustrating (the correct ones came off some slighly dodgy Czech website in the end, if I remember correctly). Apparently there's additonal issues getting digital audio to work over the HDMI interface, but I've not investigated those.

 

I can provide relevant links and files if requested.

 

This link may be helpful as well:

 

RevoUser Forum Posts on installing XP

 

3. This may be a really obvious thing to state, but the VESA PC mount for the Revo is only useful if your monitor's stand doesn't itself use the VESA mounting on the monitor. There's no way to piggyback it on older monitor designs which have their stand bolted to the screen's own VESA mount. I wound up extracting a VESA bracket from a spare monitor pole mount assembly and bolting the bracket to my monitor stand by the crude expedient of drilling holes in the right places.

 

4. (compared to the eee box, or a laptop/tablet PC). No built-in battery or UPS. You can get a working UPS for around £40, so why complain at the price.

 

4. (A minor point) The power supply is 19V. A 12V PSU would allow you to easily replace the stock PSU with a higher-rated common 3rd-party PSU for the revo itself, an external 15" monitor and the PC wing.

 

5. (a very minor niggle) If you don't want to mount the revo on a VESA mount, the little upright stand it comes with is rather wobbly and flimsy.

 

In spite of my apparently long list of negative points, I'm quite pleased with my purchase. Definitely the most PC you can get new for under £200. Now if anybody knows where to get a dual 19v/12V PSU I can replace the stock PSU with...