Wal-Mart $200 Everex GPC experience

[Duncan MacGregor]

On Ebay I got an Everex gPC, that had been originally bought from Wal-Mart for 
$200. I was curious to see what 200 bucks got you. 

This machine has a VIA mini-ATX motherboard (PCM7G-PC2500G) with a  VIA C7-D 
processor that runs at 1500Mhz. It comes with 512mb DDR2 RAM, a combo 
DVD-CDRW drive, and an ATA 80Gb hard drive. The motherboard has onboard 
audio, LAN and video, many USB connectors, two SATA connectors, and 
connectors for four IDE drives. It has two slots for DDR2 RAM.

My first thought was that apart  from the silly combo drive, and only 512mb 
RAM supplied , it was not a shabby machine to run Linux on. The combo drive 
was dead, so I replaced it with a $30 SATA DVD-RW drive.

It is supplied with gOS, a Debian variant, that uses enlightenment .
While gOS ran nicely, I had some difficulty figuring out why the developers 
were trying so hard to conserve resources. I felt gOS to be a masked-off 
version of a real OS, and I yearned for the software facility I was used to. 
The hardware is powerful enough to handle a full distro, so why not use it? 

I first installed Mandriva PowerPack 2008 (which ran well), and then replaced 
that with the new Mandriva Free 2008.1 Alpha, which also runs well. Lots of 
disk space left, and memory at 512mb is not much of an issue. (I added $38 of 
RAM to it [2Gb!] anyway.)

The machine is very responsive; I also have an AMD 2200XP and  the Everex box 
is about as fast in practice.

I think Everex should have installed a DVD-RW drive and a full-on Linux 
distro.

I am very happy with this machine. It is very quiet, and draws very little 
power. The clever motherboard is small, with IDE, SATA, USB, LAN, Video, and 
Audio, is in a standard case, with lots of room. 

It looks nice, and is quiet.

-- 
Duncan MacGregor    --- Toronto ---
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