New Aleutia H1 Ion HTPC Now on Sale for £299 in Black and White

18 August 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | No comments


We’ve finally re-released the new H1 on our website. This tiny PC is about the size of a DVD case and weighs just 486 grams! It’s less than an inch thick and comes with 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive with options for Intel or Corsair SSD or 500GB hard drive. We’ll soon offer the new Corsair F40 SSD, the world’s fastest. The H1 is available in black or white and we can install either Windows 7 Home Premium or Ubuntu 10.04.

I use one at home and love it. It’s small and quiet enough that my girlfriend doesn’t complain (it blends in with the DVDs beneath the TV). My 37″ TV is only 720p but even at 1366 x 768 resolution Ubuntu is nice and sharp (as is Windows, I use Dual Boot). I can use Picasa or XBMC to run slideshows, and it’s the ultimate bit torrent box. It uses so little power so you can have it downloading films all day and then play them back in the evening…on the same box! no need to copy stuff to a USB stick.

Aleutia H3 Relaunched with USB 3.0 Ports, Gigabyte Motherboard, and Tougher Chassis.

9 August 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | No comments

From ALEUTIA – New Product Shots

We’ve relaunched our popular H3 today with a new Gigabyte GA-H55N-USB3 mini-itx motherboard. This board has received a great review from Anandtech.com and after personally soak testing it for the last week in our new galvanized steel case I can confirm it is a superior to the Intel DH57JG. Power consumption is just as low but the BIOS has far more features and the system includes a pair of USB 3.0 ports to further future proof the H3.

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Aleutia H1 Ultra Small Ion HTPC: New Product Shots, Launching August 10

9 August 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | No comments

From ALEUTIA – New Product Shots

Pictured with Stand and Front I/O. Also ships with VESA mounting kit.

From ALEUTIA – New Product Shots

Rear I/O consists of: 4 x USB 2.0 Ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI (with Audio support), and DVI port (with DVI to VGA adapter included), 19V DC Input, Audio Input. There is an SMA socket for the 3db WLAN antenna (included). Of course the internal Mini PCIe WLAN card plays beautifully with Linux.

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New Aleutia D100 PC, Designed for Web Middleware like Flash. A digital signage PC.

18 July 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | No comments

From ALEUTIA – New Product Shots

W’e've been an Intel house for sometime but AMD has had some great offerings in 2010. We like the dual core D510 processor because it is fanless but the Intel boards only come with a VGA port. Zotac charges £30 more wholesale to give you a worse version of the board, albeit with an HDMI port. At the top end the Core i3 530 and Core i5 661 offer great performance and don’t use much power but they are just 2 cores and they are expensive.

We’ve tested the i7 860 and it’s a beast but it doesn’t support iGP at the CPU so then you add more power and cost by putting in a video card.

There aren’t many AMD mini-itx boards so we have opted for an Asrock mATX board (GeForce 8200 chipset) and combined it with an incredibly slim mATX case.

We really don’t care about gaming but we do love web browsing. And the modern web contains so much middleware like Java Script and Adobe Flash that you need a better processor.

Just writing this blog on my single core AMD Neo 1.6GHz netbook CPU is frustratingly slow.

So we take a very cheap AMD single core processor (the Sempron 140) that’s clocked at 2.7GHz. Most applications are still only designed to run off one core so what matters is a single fast core. It’s 45W TDP so we only need one fan to cool it and of course it boasts a reasonable chipset and I/O like HDMI, DVI, VGA that makes it fine for playing 1080p content.

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New Aleutia H1: World’s Smallest Ion PC

8 July 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | 1 comment

Later this month, Aleutia.com will release the new H1. It’s a powder white HTPC that you can wrap your hands around. With Dual Core Atom 330 processor, and powerful Nvidia 9400 onboard graphics, it’s a very capable PC for general use.

Plays Full HD 1080p content as well as Flash in HD, neither of which my notebook can handle.

19V DC Input. 2GB RAM, 40GB Intel X25-M SSD.

Aleutia N2 Laptop Coming in June

17 May 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | 1 comment

We’ve always been a desktop company. For schools and institutions, we still think desktops are better because you can match them with a full size keyboard and mouse and a big monitor. If one of those pieces fails it can be swapped out and it’s easier for 2 students to share a 20″ monitor than a notebook display.

But for individual consumers the story is different.

A notebook is the least expensive and most energy efficient way to combine a computer, display, and keyboard. And of course, it’s more portable.

Right now, the budget notebook market is split between netbooks and desktop replacements. Netbooks offer great battery life but have 10″ displays and cramped keyboards that make them unusable as a primary computer. They are great for “couch surfing” and as a secondary PC but too awkward for long term use.

Desktop Replacements usually have 15″ displays but terrible battery life and are awkward to carry.

The N2 offers something between these options with a 12″ display and a DVD-RW in a portable package with a 6-cell battery.

Complete specs are:

  • 12.1″ 1280 x 800 Matte Display (Glossy Displays are too reflective for use in sunny countries)
  • T4400 Pentium Dual Core Processor (2 x 2.2GHz)…a powerful enough processor to play 720p videos or watch YouTube in High Definition.
  • 2GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
  • 250GB 5400RPM Hard Drive or 40GB Intel X25-V Solid State Drive
  • 802.11 b/g/n WLAN
  • 1.3 MP Webcam
  • 3 x USB 2.0 Ports
  • 1 x Gigabit LAN
  • 8X DVD-RW Dual Layer Drive
  • 1.792 KG

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Dance-Off: Kingston 30GB SSDNow SSD vs. Western Digital WD2500BEKT (7200RPM) HDD

30 April 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | No comments

Update: The Kingston SSD is the most low-end consumer SSD we’ve come across so seemed a good idea to pit it against a 250GB 7200RPM 2.5″ Western Digital HDD (WD2500BEKT) that goes for half the price.

Many of our customers need solid state drives because they are operating in difficult places. But they don’t usually need much storage capacity. A school in Africa can’t take the risk of a moving hard drive but because the bandwidth is so limited there isn’t much that needs to be on the PC save for applications. A sailboat owner does not want a hard drive because it can’t be expected to last but at the same time their navigation software (usually Sea Pro) only takes up a few GB.

That’s why we are always on the lookout for smaller, less expensive SSDs that still offer fast performance. We used to sell the Pretec 8GB SSDs but because they were basically CF cards (and very slow ones) that became a bottleneck for the T1s in terms of performance.

Lately, we’ve shipped the Intel 40GB X25-V but it costs too much, so we were psyched to see Kingston release this 30GB SSD and immediately bought 20.

Block Output SSD: 45.306 MB/s
Block Output WD2500BEKT: 85.164 MB/s
Rewrite: 28.676 MB/s
Rewrite WD2500BEKT: 38.859 MB/s
Block Input: 126.98 MB/s
Block Input WD2500BEKT: 96.247 MB/s
Random Seeks Per Second: 1569
Random Seeks Per Second WD2500BEKT: 180.3

The Intel X25-V performed better than claimed (with read speeds of 211MB/s instead of 175MB/s). Kingston scores far lower than it claims to  but it’s actually quite snappy.

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