Mac mini size PC's for wall mounted rack

[ranj]

Hi All

 

We have an area in school where we would like to keep our machines away from the students. What we previously did was put 13 1u rackmountable machines in a wall mounnted rack.They were low powered machines and didnt take up much space so were suited for this.

 

Its come to the time to replace these pc's and dont want to change any of the infrastructure just replace the 1u PC's.

 

Space is a premium so the plan is to buy mac mini's. they are quiet,dont take up much space and would fit in the rack perfectly with a few shelves.

 

A question I had was is there a way to boot mac mini's automatically into Windows when they start up. We unlikely to use Mac os as the operating system. My understanding of boot camp was you have to hold a button down at startup, is this correct? can this be set so it always boots windows instead?

 

I have been looking at tiny PC's (e.g Dell Optiplex's) but these are too big for the rack, Mac mini's are a perfect size.

 

I rather not spend a fortune on mac mini's and would rather buy PC equivalent mac mini's size computers but am struggling to find any.

 

If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

 

Thanks

[adameye]

have you looked at the acer net-tops, installed several of them in a school on thursday, they are small enough so we screwed them onto the back of the monitor. they work really well too!

[synaesthesia]

quite right, the Revo's particularly - the nvidia Ion power gives them twice as much juice as a Mac Mini with half the power consumption and far less cost.

[john]

Unless its different on the mini, my Macbook defaults to boot Windows over Apple OS as thats what I set it to do in the bootcamp options.

 

Why can you not just change the components in your 1U rack cases for new ones and re-use the cases and keep them in the rack?

[adameye]

quite right, the Revo's particularly - the nvidia Ion power gives them twice as much juice as a Mac Mini with half the power consumption and far less cost.

 

yes we have the revo's, how dod you have them set up?

[Boon72]

you can use some free software called bootpicker which you can set up to automatically choose either OSX or Windows

[Arthur]

quite right, the Revo's particularly - the nvidia Ion power gives them twice as much juice as a Mac Mini with half the power consumption and far less cost.

By juice, do you mean the GPU? If so, they both use the same one (a GeForce 9400M). Also, the Mac mini apparently uses less than 14W when idle which is pretty good for a desktop.

[srochford]

Have a look at Viglen's mini-PC - Viglen - Product Range - XUBUMPCL

 

It's smaller than a Mac mini but also less powerful so it may not do what you want.

 

It's a nice box for when you do want something that can fit on the back of a monitor or in other small places.

[Chris_Jones]

Im assuming that if you built 1U rackmount PC's you used a small form factor motherboard, could you not just replace the motherboard with a mini-itx atom unit? eg Scan.co.uk: Gigabyte GA-GC330UD, Intel 945GC, Integrated Intel Atom N330 CPU (1.6GHz), DDR2 667, Mini ITX is what we use for small form factor units. These work fine as staff or classroom PCs (actually they are faster than the celerons they replaced!)

[pwds]

There's always the Eeebox PC. Not a personal recommendation I've never used one but should be cheaper and might well use less power than the Mac mini.

 

Will come with an XP licence which depending on your licencing model will probably save you a fair bit.

 

As always, try before you buy to ensure whatever you buy is man enough for the ICT and/or media tasks you'll be asked to perform with them.