The ZPC-GX31, a Computer in a Keyboard

Here is an example of a great idea that will probably never take off with the power user community: the Zero-Footprint-PC™ (ZPC-GX31). The reason why it won’t take off is simple: it cannot support a discreet graphics card. For that reason you are stuck with Windows XP, which is yesterday’s news for many people; alternatively you could go for Ubuntu Linux, or any other flavor of Linux for that matter. For those of us that do have a place in our home for a small form PC, this could be a winner. As configured with a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4500, 1GB of RAM and a DVD/CDRW optical drive, you are only paying $700.


I played around with the configurations to make it a little bit more versatile and came up with the following specifications:
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4500 - this is not going to break any speed records, but it will give you more than enough zip in XP to make your user experience a pleasant one.
4GB of RAM: this is over the top for a non-gaming machine, but 4GB is only $25 more than 2GB, so why not?
Internal 802.11g Wireless - You can get an external option for a lot less than the $99 that this upgrade costs, but internal is infinitely more sexy.

To put all of that together and add a DVD-R drive will set you back $929, not exactly cheap, but more than you would ever need from a machine running a lackluster Intel G31 graphics chipset. The perfect PC to take from room to room, it is less functional than a notebook, but not too hard to set up. If they really wanted to sell this thing to the performance crowd, I would suggest that they pack in some higher end graphics. Rather than Intel G31, this thing should be have some DirectX 10 compatible NVidia GO. Give it that and you will have a “portable” PC that really challenges the bulky gaming notebooks that are achieving such unprecedented popularity of late.