Wal-Mart $200 Everex GPC experience

teddy mills teddymills-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Jan 4 16:14:30 UTC 2008


At the next TLUG meeting , can you bring this PC with you?
Maybe we can hook it up to the projector.



Duncan MacGregor wrote:
> 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.
>
>   

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