These are quite nifty little boxes for a lightweight machine to monkey around with. Very nice if you like to play with hardware. Why?
Lots of connectivity — a standard DE-9 RS232 port (sometimes wrongly called a DB-9), plus three powered DE-9 ports. Plus a 12 V supply socket built in — designed to run an LCD point-of-sale monitor, because these are sold as POS computers. Plus a Centronics-compatible parallel port, a single full-height PCI slot, Ethernet, integrated audio, VGA, PS/2 keyboard and mouse. Motherboard has a floppy IDE header, spare SATA sockets and a cash draw connector — I’m sure some clever person could make good use of that.
Half a dozen USB ports, and has PS/2 ports as well, so if you want to use your USB ports as USB ports, and have older mouse/keyboard, they can stay out of the way.
Atom chip, so low processing power but very low power consumption (4 W). The Atom 230 is 64-bit. It’s not an N230. “The 230 is specifically designed for nettops and various other mobile internet connected devices.”
Intel compatible, so can run your favourite (lightweight) Linux distribution, FreeDOS, some versions of Windows, BSD, Haiku (I’m guessing — have not tried), whatever. I tried out a bunch of options, but in the end nothing was a good as Debian (via Kali Linux in this case, which offers a very small net install download), and OpenBSD.
Cheap on ebay (eg A$38) or even from an auction house clearing old shop fittings (A$10).
No need for an external transformer. Quiet, too.
Anyway, just a toy to monkey with.
DSPACE 