The $20 computer

When was the last time you bought a computer for $20 and had it on the Internet five minutes later?

It just happened to me. I got this HP T5300 thin client -- works like a PC, except it has no disk drives -- for $20 on eBay from a health-care business. These things often sell for a couple hundred dollars but usually go used for $50 or so. This one is based on the Windows CE embedded operating system (others are Linux based), with a 533 MHz processor, 32 MB of flash memory and 64 MB of RAM. It's enough to run Explorer (no Macromedia Flash player, though), and it's enough to post to this blog via Movable Type.

And this thin client is about half the size of the Thin Puppy. Unfortunately, it only uses a USB keyboard and mouse, and I've got PS/2 versions, so I'm sharing the peripherals from the Dell at the moment.

Even so, this thing was blissfully easy to configure for the Internet (I logged on as the administrator and went into the settings). Since it's Windows-based, there's no Linux learning curve, but I'd love to run it off of Linux just the same. That might only be possible by pulling the flash memory module and starting/booting from scratch. But strictly as a Web terminal, this thing is working great.