Linuxguru,
Regarding your questioning of systems, a while back I wrote a bit about the SV24, I purchased one for my daughter as an upgrade to her I-opener which was running outa gas... this note is being posted on the 2nd one I purchased for my wife. Having about a months experience or so now, I can offer some insight...
The SV24 is WAAAYYYYY COOL! The Outpost offer was for a 1.1 GHz Celeron bundled with an SV24 barebones for $299. I regret not the purchase... I'd dare you to find a 4 slice toaster smaller .. it also looks cool... here are the advantages...
Ports for everything (except digital video lcd out), serial, parallel, usb (4), firewire (2), keyboard, mouse, ntsc and sv plus vga out. The sv out looks about the best on tv I have ever seen from a home system.
It has 2 IDE channels internally plus a floppy (unused by me). On one I run an I-Opener laptop (9mm IBM Travelstar) and on another an older IDE taken from a dead pavillion... for surfing and kid gaming (kid meaning early years, like sonic) it works great... being able to plug in a dvd player also rocks.
The only gripes are no agp slot, only 1 pci slot (i'd gladly swap the pci for an agp, I think the graphics are most likely the thing I'd want to improve the most, much of the other stuff can be augmented with firewire or usb products). And the default fans are a bit noisy (compared to an I-Opener), rumor is the power supply intake fan isn't necessary, however I'm reluctant to turn it off... I'm considering picking up a few quiet fans...
The unit is light, small, likely if it fell it'd survive without even much of a crashing noise, it boots anything, including usb hdd, fdd, cd and net... support from shuttle seems decent...
Rumors are SV25 is about to be released in the US anyday, should permit 1.4GHz and more modern processors. Also a P4 version was discussed but in a slightly larger form factor (more like the pandora plus, but with a P4 inside). 2 SV24's are enough for my families needs at the moment, I'm looking forward to a P4 or Athlon product with similar size and will buy instantly if under $450 and if it includes an AGP (preferably 4x).
For family use, for watching video (my wife is using my daughters while I surf and is watching Carrie on DVD, looks and works great) these are wonderful, form factor, weight is small, the barebones comes fully assembled sans CPU, memory and drives. It's fast and easy to set these up, close em up, and leave them alone... we're very very pleased as a family. They are very similar to IA's but are perhaps a bit more than just an IA, more like a digital toaster oven vs say a 2Ghz oven... if you don't need 1200x1600 digital out graphics at 100 frames per second likely these toaster ovens will do great
Good luck!
