Having read Chris’ FunkyKit look at the Shuttle SH110R4, it got me itching again for a Shuttle XPC. I’m just way too lazy to go and build a PC nowadays, and admittedly, I haven’t been following all the CPU, RAM and GFX card differences and updates; I just want a barebones small Shuttle XPC, slap in a CPU and RAM and that’s it. I have fond memories of Shuttle XPCs, at one time around 12 years ago I had 5 different varieties of them, if I recall correctly 4 of them were using AMD XP CPUs and one was using an Intel Pentium 4…..yes it was that long ago. Even though with an XPC you don’t have all that much room inside them to play around, I kept on finding new ways to mod and use them:
- Placed in the restaurant I had at the time, this was primarily used as the audio/visual hub. Via Winamp it would be playing music playlists (weddings, general background, birthdays, etc) and it was hooked up so you can use it as a karaoke machine. It was controlled via VNC from another PC in the office.
- With an ignition voltage overload switch from KustomPCs, this one was placed in the boot of my car. Attached was a 5″ Lilliput touchscreen TFT, a USB camera at the back for parking, with a 3G PCIMIA card for Internet access.
- The 5.25″ drive bay had a mini all-in-one Cooler Master CPU watercooler. This was running on a 3rd party BIOS which meant I overclocker the system and it was primarily just crunching SETI.
- Fitted with 2 x 1TB hard disks, this was the file server. It had an TFT panel modded to the front of it so you could control it.
- The office XPC, somehow no matter what I did to it it would always overheat. It ended up with no cover on it and big watercooling kit attached to it which was bigger than the XPC itself.
So with this in mind, and wanting to have a media player of some kind which would free up the use of my laptop, I wanted to buy a new one, so off the SSP I went. To my disappointment, I couldn’t find any retailer selling them anymore, only similar small cases by the likes of Silverstone and Lian-Li which you’d have to get the motherboard separately. I can find some on some HK retailer’s websites, but I’m old fashioned, I like to play with it and have it in my hands before buying one.
There are alternative solutions for me that I saw; an unbranded laptop with an HDMI port (probably the main feature I need) for dirt cheap HK$1799 or a touchscreen ‘dashboard console’ which runs Windows 7 and are used to control TVs with network capabilities, only 64Gb of internal storage but does have 4 USB ports.
