Quote:
Originally Posted by Edwood  Only problem with laptops is that many are quite noisy.
-Ed
|
Funny, i have the same complaint about most ITX systems.
When VIA comes up with a new ITX board, they can't predict what sort of case it's going into, so they stick tiny heatsinks and tiny high-speed fans on anything that might get hot.
I used to work for a company that used a ton of ITX boxes as well as a boatload of MSI's proprietary-formfactor mini-systems.
The MSI boxes were faster, quieter, more reliable, and after figuring in the production costs of putting together ITX boxes from parts that came from different vendors, substantially cheaper. And this was not "in theory, after human costs" more expensive. They were literally close to $100 more expensive to assemble - for twice the noise and a quarter the performance.
They were also slightly bigger - but not enough bigger to make a difference.
I don't understand or like the shoebox formfactor that Shuttle goes for, but their reliability and performance is also quite good.
fwiw my dedicated jukebox is a 2U rack case with a full-size ATX motherboard running debian and freevo - but my music is already organized into subdirectories by artist and album, so it was a slam-dunk. If you go for the "everything in one huge pile + a database" storage method, it won't work so well.
. Im digging this so far...very nice. Thanks for the inspiration nyc paramedic. I have one more issue I need to resolve. I cant control the volume from my laptop or my NDS...is there something in the mpd.conf I need to edit?
