Pondering a nettop for media viewing?

[Flibb]

With Christmas approaching I thought its about time to think about presents. Rather than buying odds and sods Mrs Flibb and myself tend to buy one large prezzie between us.

Sooo I have been pondering some kind of small nettop, whos main use would be
1. Playing streamed video from my main PC
2. Iplayer
3. Gentle web browsing
4. Amiga emulator

Main reason for getting small is that we don't have a lot of space in our bedroom (main place it would live), and I want it to be semi portable and quiet.

We have a 22" LCD in the bedroom with these connectors 1 x HDMI, PC Input, S-Video, 2 x Scart, Component.
I would also like to find a way to connect it to a CRT TV which has scart and component, any ideas how to go about this?
No CD/DVD required, ability to play HD material (in the future) would be handy.

Price? Needs to be under £200 if possible.

Cheers

[staffsMike]

Any of them will do that.

I can vouch for the MSI wind being superbly quiet and high quality. Overclockable if ever it runs a bit slow for you but none too different to others really.

I think now my money would be ION, overclockers have the POV one
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...source=froogle

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would forget the Atom for any of netbooks above £250!! New netbooks containing AMD Athlon low voltage single and dual core processors are coming out and these will have much more processing power than an Atom.

These notebooks include the Lenovo X100e and MSI Wind 12 U230.

[Flibb]

Think I mislead when I said portable, its a nettop I am after (small pc that plugs in to monitor) not netbook.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Think I mislead when I said portable, its a nettop I am after (small pc that plugs in to monitor) not netbook.

The Dell Zino HD is a tad expensive but should do the job:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/home...=dhs&cs=ukdhs1

This should also do the job but is the limit I would pay for any computer which has an Atom processor unless it was a ruggedised computer:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/172706

You may want to consider these two SFF PCs too:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167158

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/160506

[Flibb]

Looking more towards something like
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-...8409509&sr=8-1

[staffsMike]

They certainly do the job. Around £150 elsewhere (ebuyer for one) but perhaps look for a dual core version (if that isn't one).

[Flibb]

Wish they would give the versions with differing OS and specs their own model names.

The £150 ones appear to be single core, 1Gb, b/g wifi and linux
The £225 ones runs vista, and is 2Gb.
£250 gets win7, draft n wifi, 4gb, optical out, some other stuff.

Heres the win7 one
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/124245...C/Product.html

Temptation is to either go cheap or expensive and ignore the middle. Although £250 is more than I wanted, and wife is even considering spending.

[nxg]

Have you seen the WD HD Live TV? Scan are doing them for less than £100 (I know as just bought one) and they stream all sorts of things. They're very small too for what they do.

If you have a much bigger budget, have a gander at the QNAP stuff.

[aeonf242]

The basic Dell Inspiron Zino comes up at between £279 and £349 (for dual core and wireless) at the moment...if you're considering the Revo check out ebuyer prices...they have lots of models from £144 linus basic to £280ish Dual core, Win 7, 500gb HDD and 4gb RAM

[Terbinator]

Could you not just put an AMD mini-itx build together ?

[aeonf242]

similar musing here:

[Flibb]

Could you not just put an AMD mini-itx build together ?

To be honest the Revo does exactly what i want, and the big benefit over diy is that its very small. The included bracket ataches to the vesa mounting points and the PC clips in to it. It also comes with a mini BT keyboard, mouse, and a copy of win 7. The down side when compared to diy is the c**p they install, also suprised that its win7 64 on a 1 gig machine. Might do a fresh instal and see if I can get a little extra snappiness out of it. have read a couple of threads on avforums about a noticeable speed increase after a fresh instal, wonder if they reinstalled 32bit rather than 64.

[scaryjim]

I was certainly surprised at how small the 32bit Win 7 footprint is - about 400MB for a clean install iirc. Personally I'd be much more inclined to get the £144 Linux version + OEM Win 7 32bit, which is only £71 on ebuyer at the minute: that lot would still only tot up to £215ish

[oolon]

I have a single core aspire one, its ok for web work however maxes itself out when it comes to streaming video, the dual core POV atom system I have at home is much better load wise. Acer are bring out a dual core version however its not out (in the uk) yet. Also the acer one does not have a media drive in it. I would get the asus EB1501-B0117 dabs link here, as it is dual core has more memory, a bigger drive, a DVD and 2 GB of memory. However is double the price of the Acer revo I am using at work.

[scaryjim]

... maxes itself out when it comes to streaming video ...

Of course, once Flash 10.1 gets out of beta that'd be moot with an ION system because it would hardware accelerate the flash video for you...