I bought a shuttle X - indeed has only one PCI slot, but also one AGP slot along with the built in video card. Ditched the floppy drive (have an external USB sony one still for emergencies) and ordered it with 2 120Gb hard drives. Nice. Quiet too. coops
I read the Shuttles have liquid coolers desgined and built-in (not added on later). They are supposed to be very quiet.
If I get a laptop I would want one with a dual monitor video card, so I can hook up an LCD monitor and have 2 screens . I am looking at some Dell laptop configurations but nowhere do I see the option of adding a dual monitor card. Where can I get that? I don't need anything fancy though just 256 MB or 384 MB RAM, 20-30GB HD, CD-RW/DVD combo drive and the dual display card, so something in the $1,000-1200 range + the cost of the card upgrade.
http://www.mobl.com/expansion/pci/1slot/index.html http://www.digitaltigers.com/sidecar.shtml http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/reviews/vtbook/ http://www.margi.com/products/prod_dtg_faq.htm
I've got a Shuttle and I like it because it's quiet. I upgraded it to 2.5 GHz and 768MB for trading (with an 80GB fluid bearing drive for continuous quiet use). If you go over 2.5 GHz the extra heat from the processor will have the single fan on the Shuttle running at high speed and then it's no longer quiet. Since I've squeezed all my charts onto a single screen, I'm looking at a laptop in the future, but I'll be making sure that I've got enough CPU power not to freeze the charts without overdoing the GHz and ending with no battery life. For now, the Shuttle's cool.
Micro PCs are even smaller than Shuttle I believe. Check out www.jadetec.com. Advantage of these is that I understand you can "Stack-em", so if you want a cluster type system with loads of memory and processing power you can achieve it, or alternatively have a number of seperate systems.