Solar powered ‘desktop PC’

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This setup looks familiar!! Mini PC, Solar panel battery pack. The only difference here to my UMPC setup is that the CPU and screen are in separate units.

The Aleutia E1 is billed as the ‘ultimate off-grid computer’ by the London based company and they also offer the complete solution as an ‘office in a box’ package.

I have a few issues with the package though. First, the PC itself is running on a very low end 200Mhz, unspecified ‘X86’  processor. Secondly, the screen they’re using can take up to 10W. With the PC taking up to 8W, the whole solution seems fairly heavyweight compared to a UMPC-based solution.

I’ve just been testing an HTC Shift which has the 7″ 800×480 screen and can run Vista with Aero at an average 8.5w with the Wifi on! The AMD-based Kohjinsha SA1 averages even less and if you managed to get hold of an XO Laptop through he OLPC’s G1G1 program, you’d be averaging something like 3W drain giving you 6-times the run-time of this solution – with twice the processor speed!

On the plus side though, the complete solar office solution comes in at under 500 pounds sterling. That’s not bad at all.

Via LinuxScrew. Thanks Klaus.