This product is great.
I work from home and my main pc with its 1500w power supply and crossfire graphics was draining my budget when trying to run it 10 hours+ a day for business.
I use this little energy saver for general business use such as microsoft office 2007 and web browsing.
This is not for use as a home theater pc.
I have a nas set up and streaming video from the nas seems a little too taxing for this pc.
Compulabs seems to want to market this as an htpc and that is the reason it lost a star. Were they to be truthful and market it as the simple energy sipper that it is then I would have given it 5 stars.
This saves me more than 150 dollars a month on electricity over running my main pc full time like I used to.
Wonderful product for web browsing and simple computing but do not expect a full fledged htpc because that is not what this computer is good at doing.

Posted on: 2010-04-27
By T Man

When this is combined with a solid state drive, this computer makes no noise. When I booted it with Ubuntu Linux Server 9.10, it was the fastest boot time I've seen in a long time. I'm not sure if that was the computer or the drive.

I wouldn't do much in the way of graphic intensive stuff on it. You can tell the graphics are a little slow compared to a desktop, but I didn't buy it for that purpose. I purchased it to be a home server running all the time in a garage. I haven't run it in the temperature extremes of the garage yet. From what I can tell, it will be fast enough for being a server, and it seems hearty enough. The top of the computer does get a little warm though.

It can handle a USB based DVD-ROM drive to boot the the OS for installation. You just need to buy that separately in case you can't boot from something else.

I wish CompuLab made a computer without the wireless card and sold it on Amazon. It took a bit of effort to remove the wireless card from the mini-PCI express slot. I had to cover the antenna hole with a bolt and nut. I didn't want to be powering something that I'm not going to use and interfere with the other wireless devices. At least the wireless card can be removed.

For low power computing, I think it's pretty good for its purpose. It's nice and simple.

Posted on: 2010-04-01
By San Jose Reviewer

Not a speed demon by any means, but that wasn't expected. In fact, its ability to display very clear 1080p Hi-definition was a pleasant suprise, and while you won't be playing any Blu-Rays or probably even DVDs (here's a hint: I installed Windows XP Media Center edition, and simply trying to start Media Center crashes the video card), it plays "HD" YouTubes just fine.

I have a small solid-state drive installed and that keeps it both fast and silent.

All in all, I generally like it. The video card is indeed slow, and that's not just the resolution: for example, playing BubbleSpinner - not exactly the world's most demanding game - crawls when a lot of activity is happening, and I found that to be true even when I rolled the resolution all the way back to 800x600. So it's a poor implementation, not just the very limited memory. One star off.

The second star is because of the frankly inexcusable wireless operation. This unit will run for days or weeks uninterupted surfing the web, but try to transfer files to it and it will bomb and lose the connection, every time. This is not an isolated incident, and it not associated with just one release or driver - the FitPC web site shows that dozens, if not hundreds, of customers have been reporting this issue going back several years. (Yes, I know about the different drivers and yes, I know about the two wireless card settings that have to be changed.) So a second star off for having the problem in the first place, and also for not fixing it.

I have no doubt that this thing would be a stellar performer plugged into a wired network, by the way.

Cool, silent (especially with a SSD), inconspicuous, suprisingly snappy performance, high resolution output (including to HDMI).

Unreasonably slow video performance (even for such a small & cheap unit), unreasonably unreliable wireless connection.

Edit: another star off for the complete B.S. response the manufacturer posted...read response and my rebuttal.



Posted on: 2010-03-26
By R. Boatman
Helpful index: 100%

As a tiny, power efficient PC the fit-pc2 is fantastic. It is the size of my hand and runs Windows 7 fairly well. It uses less power than an energy efficient lightbulb. I have mine set to standby after a few minutes so it really saves as much power as it possibly could. I think some people have been trying to use it as a media center PC or for doing full motion video and in my opinion that is the wrong use for this. You should get a slightly bigger PC with more power for doing those things. My media center PC is a microATX and is plenty small still for my entertainment center yet has much more horsepower. The fit-pc2 needs to be used as a tiny, energy efficient PC which can run all modern software reasonably well.

Posted on: 2010-02-08
By J. Hottes
Helpful index: 50%

Resonable price. Tiny and quiet. Works okay with Windows 7. Took a look at the performance via task manager and processor was used to capacity also the RAM. For watching HD example movies on [...] it wasn't enough. Picture started juddering right away. For listening to music and watching DVD it works.

Posted on: 2010-01-08
By S. Stirner
Helpful index: 100%