We use the PCH mainly for our online DVD collection, Netflix streaming, and Hulu...so that's what we hope we can do with this fella. I understand the CPU on this Nettop is fairly anemic, but the new Ion GPU is fairly decent...so at this price with Win 7, I figured why not. Fingers crossed for more Flash GPU support in the future.
In the interim, I'll give it a shot as a low-end HTPC...and let you folks know how it works out if you are interested.
It will do OK. I have Windows 7 installed on an Acer Aspire One Netbook with these specs;
Processor - Intel Atom N270 / 1.6 GHz
RAM - 1 GB (installed)
Graphics - Intel GMA 950
Using a WinTV Nova T-Stick (USB) Windows Media Centre works flawlessly for viewing freeview (free to air digital) and other media tasks. .. Youtube ... music ... whatever I have thrown at it.
I even have Adobe Photoshop CS4 installed on it, amongst other things, and that works at a usable speed ... Windows 7 is so much less a resource hog than Vista and is even faster than XP so I have found it breathes life into quite low end hardware.
It's not instant response but it's more than good enough. Hope your experiments concur with my experience.
From what I hear, it streams video well if that format uses the GPU. That includes 1080 without hiccups...but it has a tougher time with Flash-based video that relies on the CPU. Hulu at 420p is supposed to be smooth, but higher resolution may not be acceptable until Adobe tweaks the Flash plugin.
Just wanted to provide an update...just on the off chance that anyone is paying attention.
Summary - awesome...and it just got more awesome with the new Flash 10.1 beta
A little more detail:
Elegant *very* small unit
The included wireless keyboard and mouse are decent.
Ships with an external pair of "speakers"...and they shouldn't have bothered.
OS includes a *massive* amount of bloatware...which took me about two hours to uninstall. I may eventually reformat...but I don't see the need at the moment.
Does not ship with a recovery disk. Instead, it has a recovery partition...and software that prompts you to insert a blank DVD into the drive to burn a backup copy. Yeah, very nice...if you had a DVD drive...but this bad boy doesn't.
Ships with Win 7 Home 64 bit...and Aero is insanely smooth. In fact, the entire OS feels very usable...thanks to the Ion and Atom 330...but installs and uninstalls are sloooooow.
Flash performance was okay...but got *much* better after I installed the latest 10.1 beta and the associated beta NVidia Ion drivers. Now Flash rocks and uses very little CPU when not full screen. Full screen is also watchable...but it taxes the CPU more...and Adobe and NVidia think that this is an issue with the beta plugin/drivers...and hope to have it resolved soon. Oddly enough, Hulu desktop works great full screen...but I personally find that UI annoying.
Netflix streaming (using Silverlight) is great...and I hear it will be getting better after Netflix optimizes their streams to take advantage of some recent MS GPU-leveraging enhahcements.
In summary, it rocks...especially for $329 (US). My family loves our new family room HTPC...and it is *far* easier for them to use than our old Popcorn Hour, which required a very tenuous connection to a server running PlayOn for Netflix and Hulu.
I definitely recommend this one for your Christmas list.
