The PIA, how they did it

[Robert Sinland <rsinland@means.net>]

  I don't know how many of you recall my posts re thelinuxstore.com 's
marketing
of the PIA (Personal Internet Appliance)

  The basics were something like this...

32 megs PC-100 RAM
Celeron 366 CPU
AGP graphics
Sound with speakers included
56k modem
2+  gig hard drive
Pre Loaded with Red Hat 6.0 plus some debian stuff...
note: no floppy, no CDROM

All for a measly $199

  Mine arrived today.  I havn't had much time to play with it yet, but it
IS what they
advertised.
  So how did they do it?
 Virtually everything is built into the MB.  The Graphics, sound etc, are
all on the main board.
Even the modem, though it has a tiny little daughter card setup to plug the
phone line into.
The hard drive is a Quantum Bigfoot ...ewwww  heard bad things about
those..

  My intial impression of the thing is... It works...  I don't usually run
KDE and all my other
working machines have way more then 32 megs of RAM.  It was easy to
configure to get on
the net and do some browsing with Netscape.
  I might have to plug some more RAM into the thing to do any sort of
comparison, but the way
it's currently setup, my P-120 with 96 megs of RAM running WIN 98 is a near
match, the pentium might
even be a tad faster.  My machine with the K6-2 300 and 96 megs of PC-100
RAM (also running Win 98)
totaly kills it.
Note these are only my initial impressions as I have only messed with it
for a couple hours, and I don't
know of any real good bench marks to compare the machines by.
  The cool thing is to get the case off you only have to flip two latches,
and off she comes:)
It also has one free slot, a shared ISA or PCI slot.  Can plug in one or
the other
  RS