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Mpegger

Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2001
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/ituner/micoflidead.html

Not sure if a CF adapter has ever been mentioned, but it would make for some really ultra compact PCs. 1gig CF cards are expensive, but 98SE can be made to fit in a 256mb space. Add on drivers for vid card and sound card, and you can have yourself a really small, very fast boot-up HTPC. What do you think?
 
Actually, it would probably be faster than an HDD.

I still however think that even the 64MB compactflash cards are outrageously expensive, but if money is no object then I'd go that way and get a 256 one.

Combine that with the EPIA-6000 (fanless) and a quiet PSU, and walla, noiseless comp!
 
I forgot about the extreamly minimal Linux clusters that so many make to Fold and Seti with. I actually have a couple of 2mb CF cards that would provide more then enough space for those. Also, those 1 disk firewalls/routers would work the same too. Sould work fine with an old 486, and with so little power used (just the cpu, ram, board, CF card, network card or 2, and maybe a vid card), you can probably chuck the fan in the psu. Just get a low power 150watt (do they even make those anymore?) psu and you sould have a fast booting, extreamly quiet PC.
 
well...which is it? does anyone know the transfer rate of one of these things?

I assume reads would be fairly quick (not as fast as ATA-133, I wouldnt think...but that's just a guess, really) and writes would be very slow (again...just a guess).

anyone know?
 
How many handhelds or PDAs do you know of that are used as a HTPC, Folding rig, Seti rig, or router/firewall for the home?
 
These are way to slow. The fastest on the list posted above is 24x, the fastest I can find is a 32x. 32x would be 4.7MB/s burst rate. My drive does 133/s . Why would you shoot your self in the foot like that?

The idea is good though. I want a harddrive made up of PC3700 DDR chips. A new interface would be needed, and an onboard batt, but damn that would be fast!
 
less than 5 MB/sec. VERY slow by HDD standards...but might be ok in a folding box where read/write speeds arent terribly important. you'd want to make sure you've got plenty of RAM...enough so that windows won't need to use a swap file very often.

one more comment from me:
98SE can be made to fit in a 256mb space
I don't know about that. I'm not sure it would fit on one that small.

I've never tried to install an ultra stripped down 98SE, but I just installed windows ME yesterday on my print server/folding box, and the absolute smallest I could make it was about 515 megs. I originally had it on a 750 mb hdd (got a HUGE 2 gig drive now...w00t!), and it would run out of space frequently with just a few programs installed (FAH, EM, printer driver, VNC server and not much else...I even left out Outlook Express during the install).

You could probably fit windows 3.1 pretty comfortably in that small amount of space (yuck!). You could certainly fit a small Linux distro...minus the gui, of course.
 
gahdzila said:
You could probably fit windows 3.1 pretty comfortably in that small amount of space (yuck!). You could certainly fit a small Linux distro...minus the gui, of course.
I've got Win 3.1 and a ton of programs installed on a 133MB HD in my 386, so it would definatly fit :)

How 'bout Win95? I know that it could fit onto my Packard Bell's 500MB HD with all it's zillions of pre-installed software, so there should be a way to strip that down nicely.

You guys also may want to give this a look...
"We can deliver windows images as small as 9 MB..."

JigPu
 
I'm a proud 98Lite user. :D

I got my servers Window directory clocking in at 165MB, and thats after installing the server applications. :cool:

And JigPu, thats why I started looking into CF cards being used as hard drives. I was checking thier site to see if they've released any updates or had a release date for thier XP version and saw thier claim of fitting a stripped down 9x version in under 9 MB on flash memory, and then I remembered that a CF card to a PC is just a removeable hard drive. And at that size, 4MBps is more then fast enough. And even my 165MB installtion would be quick to boot up, since 98 doesn't need to load up everything on startup, just the essentials, and then loads up whats needed when a program request it.

And I love this part...

Can I put my name down for beta testing now?

No, we'll beta test through our registered 98lite customers - the beta will be announced and made available when it is ready and not before - stop asking please :)

Good thing I registered. :D
 
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