All those that said it was vaporware have been proven wrong.  Sure it was late.  When was the last time that you saw any technology product delivered on time?  They all slip.  Most of the time they slip their schedules so early that the customers don’t even know.  Regardless, they have shipped and many people have them in their hands.  I am one of those people.  I haven’t had much time to use it, but I’ll give my first impression now, with more detail later.

I opened the box and was impressed with the construction and the size.  There was a card in the box that told me not to change the username just yet.  I’m not a fan of that security model.  I plugged it in and it came right up. The mouse did freeze up on me fairly quickly.  It turns out the wireless mouse I was using was causing problems.  As I undestand it, the CherryPal using so little power that it has some trouble with USB devices that need power.  I connected an old wired USB mouse that I had and all systems were go.  I did poke around a bit, but ran out of time.  The main thing I noticed was that the speed was very usable.  I had heard that there were some speed issues.  Personnaly, I thought it did pretty well.  I understand that this computer is not a horsepower machine.  More to come…

Note: Just to be clear I did receive a CherryPal PC for free.  Although it appears that was wasn’t vaporware, has become vaporware, or at least vapor-company….

T. Boone Pickens isn’t the only one putting some cash into wind power.  It appears that there is a plan to build a wind farm off the coast of Delaware.  Like the title says, this isn’t really new.  It’s been in the news for a few months.  I just wanted to bring it up as another example of how people are taking this kind of thing seriously.

CNN article

Maybe not president, but how about Secretary of Energy?  I need to read up on it more.  However, from what I have read and heard the Pickens Plan sounds pretty darn good.  Take a look:PickensPlan
I understand that distribution is a problem. Transmitting electricity over long distances is not very efficient. You actually lose power in the process. Some winds farms will shut the turbines down during times of reduced demand. That’s not good! There are ways to “store” electricity. Of course you can use batteries. My favorite is underground air tanks. When the demand is low, use the extra power to run compressors that force air into underground tanks or caverns. When demand is high release the stored air and drive a turbine with it. Viola! Stored electricity.

There are plenty of sources of power available. Many of them are immature, but it we work on them, we can make them happen.

More later…. need sleep….

The CherryPal C100 Desktop is available for order.  They expect to start shipping at the end of July.  This little system is very promising.  The specs are below as listed on their website.  It looks very straight forward.  It has a monitor connectotion, 2 USB ports one 10/100 ethernet port and an audio out.  I would liked to have seen 4 total USB ports.  Once you connect your keyboard and mouse you’re out of connections.  Of course you could use a hub but that’s an extra device to take up deskspace.  Using a 400MHz Freescale chip and 256MB of RAM, I’ll be interested to see what kind of performance we can get from this.  At $249 it’s a little more expensive than I had hoped.  However, if it really runs at 2 watts as claimed, it would eventually pay for itself in energy savings.  I expect to start seeing reviews of this unit soon after Aug 1.  Good Luck!

 Specifications

Freescale’s MPC5121e mobileGT processor, 800 MIPS (400 MHz) of processing
256 MB of DDR2 DRAM
4GB NAND Flash-based solid state drive
WiFi 802.11b/g Wi-Fi
Two USB 2.0 ports
One 10/100 Ethernet with RJ-45 jack
One VGA DB-15 display out jack
Headphone level stereo audio out 3.5mm jack
9vDC 2.5mm 10 watt AC-DC adapter power supply
Weighs 10 ounces
1.3” high, 5.8” x 4.2” wide

Intel has released a motherboard that has me pretty excited. Not as much as I was when I first heard about it, but still excited. Initially I mistook the report as saying the board only used 4 watts of power. That would be amazing! I have a couple of systems that run over 100 watts. It turns out that the chip (processor) uses 4 watts. The chipset that drives the rest of the board uses another 22 watts. That still leaves the board running at under 30 watts which is still good. I’m considering this board for my next build. Unless something better comes along of course.

Link

Lately, I’ve been looking for an energy efficient PC. I have upgraded to an 80 Plus power supply in my desktop, but it still uses more power than I think is necessary. Now I think a small solid-state system is the way to go. Zonbu came out with one a while ago. I don’t recall the specs, but I’ll track them down and post an update. When they first came out they were selling for $199 (I think), but required a subscription service of ~$20 a month. Not interested! It looks like they are offering the PC without the service now, which is a plus. But they’ve increased the price to $299. Not interested! They do offer the OS as a download. I like that. Unfortunately the hardware is still an issue.

Recently there has been some talk about cherrypal. It’s a similar type of system and looks promising. The last time I checked they were expecting an Aug. 4 release. Hopefully, they’ll be offered at a better price and with no subscription requirement.

Personally, I think if they can sell them for ~$150 they will be available to an entire new demographic. They price would be in reach for many, many more people. There are also those of us who would like several of these low power, silent PCs. I would like to have one in just about every room. That’s not going to happen if the price isn’t right.

-RHH