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Installation

Before going on here, just a few quick words about the installation of the system. Physical installation is a breeze, there is nothing that anybody could do wrong. The test setup used the following extra components:

• 1 x 512 MB Mushkin Level2 PC2100 DDR
• 1 x 1 GB Mushkin PC2100 DDR
• 1 x IBM 60GXP (20GB)
• 1 x 12x Pioneer DVD

Installation of the drivers is more painful since there is no good install shield that would just run through the motions. In other words, each driver needs to be manually selected and then installed with the necessary reboots in between and consequent selection of "My Computer ... and so on". This is just one of the small issues that could use some attention.

Upgrading WinXP to ServicePack1 took long enough to have dinner in between but those are the concessions one has to make with a lower power system.

We could have done with a custom SFF case but the size of the entire setup is probably demonstrated best by sticking the EPIA-M, David Byrne-style, into a standard case (which, BTW, was too small to house the ABit NF7-S).

Because of some of the peculiarities of the C3 processor, most of the older Winstones will not run on this particular CPU without extensive patching, the latest incarnations, that is content Creation Winstone2003 and Business Winstone 2002 will run without a problem, though. Running these benchmarks is a somewhat futile effort in esoterics, the only relevant finding is that the system is capable of running all applications contained within the bundle, whoever really needs performance is at the wrong address with the EPIA anyway.

Biz and CC Winstones, latest editions. We don't want to embarrass ourselves by adding Granite Bay scores here, the system is working and still faster than any human could possibly input data, at least with respect to the Business part. In Content Creation, some of the Photoshop filters took gawdawfully long to complete.

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