Postby Howard Long » Mon Mar 09, 2009 15:16
A very late reply, but in case it's of use I have just purchased a Scaleo E that Maplin currently has rebadged (code A99JH) on sale for £150 that includes a Celeron 346 3.06GHz CPU and 1GB RAM. It also includes a wireless keyboard/mouse and a remote control. Even the batteries for the keyboard and remote control are included. All that is missing is an OS, hard disk and optical drive.
I added a PATA 500GB disk and a SATA LG Blu-Ray burner GGW-L20L. The OS I installed was Vista Ultimate.
I have tried PowerDVD 9 ultra, WinDVD 9 and Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre. As it stood, none of these worked well enough to use it for Blu-ray: either the players crashed or the frame rate was unuseable.
After some investigation I installed a ATI HD4550 graphics card (Maplin A34JF, £50). Although it's a low profile PCI-E x16 card it also needs a low profile blanking plate (Maplin A05HA, £4) that I'm awaiting. Blu-rays now works absolutely perfectly in PowerDVD 9 ultra with less than 50% CPU. Interestingly there is still not enough grunt to run either Arcsoft TMT or WinDVD 9, with both these players using up all the CPU.
For the record, the only problems I have are that I can't get the remote to work and for some reason the keyboard sometimes goes potty, rapidly repeating the last key pressed. A normal USB keyboard works fine. Also the eject button for the LG Blu-ray player doesn't quite line up.
Cheers, Howard