The SV24 Spacewalker

A small, inexpensive, but reasonable computer

Shuttle makes an all in one motherboard called the FV24, and recently released a bare bones system called the SV24 or the SpaceWalker. It is a tiny (10"x8"x7") computer which packs a number of interesting features into a very small space.

I have had a number projects which require a portable PC that might be interesting, and I realized I could easily build a system around the SpaceWalker for around $500. So I did.

Overall I am very pleased with the little box. I bought a cheap 40gb drive to go into it, dropped in the 50x CDROM that I hadn't used since I bought a DVD drive, added an 850Mhz Celeron for the main processor, and 512 megabytes of PC133 memory. The builtin graphics aren't stupendous, but they are somewhat reasonable, and good enough for anything that I have to do.

I've installed Win2K, FreeBSD and Red Hat Linux on this machine, with basically no trouble whatsoever. Red Hat even configured X in a completely sane way. It's been a fun box so far, and I'll probably write up some more about it as I gain more experience with it.

Features

Motherboard supports Socket 370 processors: I chose an 850Mhz Celeron processor, rather than a more expensive PIII.
ProSavage video: The onboard video is nothing to compare with the Geforce 2, but it isn't entirely shabby either.
Composite video and S-Video outputs: Nice for gameplaying or video applications
Two DIMM slots: Memory is cheap, I populated mine with a single 512M DIMM.
4 USB ports: Two in front, two in back.
Firewire: Kind of neat for an inexpensive computer.
Space for a hard drive: I chose a Maxtor 40gb drive.
Space for a CDROM/DVD drive: I used a 50x CDROM drive that I had lying around.

The SV24 Spacewalker

A small, inexpensive, but reasonable computer

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