The Hardware
Before we booted up the machine, we wanted to take a look under the hood to see how the system was laid out. As expected for a $200 machine, the insides looked rather sparse — however, this machine does include the following:
- VIA pc2500 motherboard
- 1.5GHz VIA C7-D Processor
- 80 Gig Seagate Barracuda IDE 7200 RPM hard drive
- A single 512 MB DDR2 533 DIMM (one empty slot for upgrade)
- DVD player AND CD burner
- VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics
- Realtek 6-channel Audio
- Ethernet card
- VGA port
- Six USB ports (two on front)
- Headphone/Mic port on front and Line-IN/Mic/Speaker port on back
- Basic set of USB powered speakers
- Mouse & Keyboard included
So, what does this all mean? Well, given that this machine is designed to be a basic internet device with much of the processing power being offloaded to Google's servers, the internal resources should be enough for what the average user will need. If a user wants to upgrade the core gPC, there is ample room for improvement. For example, you could add in more RAM, install additional hard drives (room for at least three more), add a DVD burner, or even install SATA drives (see Figure 6 for internal shot of gPC).
However, given that the gPC was designed for a specific set of hardware features and is a stripped down Linux OS, driver support might be spotty at best. As we have already indicated, even the internal modem is not supported out of the box.
Figure 6: Internals of gPC