How low can you go? (Power that is)

I’ve always been interested in helping to save the environment. I know my gadget purchases aren’t necessarily good for the environment. At least now Costco is recycling many technology items for free. But I’ve always been interested in how low you can go in power consumption. My Windows Home Server is running on a Via C3 at 1.3GHz that pulls about 39W idle out of the wall outlet, and that’s with two HDDs. The Everex gPC being sold at Walmart for $199 uses the carbon-neutral C7-D processor running at 1.5GHz. What’s really intriguing to me is that the gOS that it runs might as well be called the Google OS in that the apps that are installed are really links to

1. Firefox
2. Google Mail
3. Google News
4. Google Calendar
5. Google Maps
6. Google Docs and Spreadsheets
7. Google Product Search
8. Blogger
9. YouTube
10. Facebook
11. Faqly
12. Meebo
13. Rythmbox
14. Skype
15. Wikipedia
16. Xine

as described in this blog entry which has an interview with David Liu, the founder of gOS. The beauty of having all the applications and even data in the Google cloud is that you may be able to get away without a hard drive in the system, booting off flash and storing all data either on the Internet or on a network share in the home, like a Windows Home Server.

So the purpose of this blog entry is to state that, time and money allowing, I will see how low a power PC I can construct that can perform the functions of a typical PC. My initial plans are

1. Try the gOS, which is a Ubuntu derivative, on one of my regular machines, just to see how well it works. Unfortunately, the torrent download is taking forever. I’ve only been able to download less than 1MB out of the 728MB over the past hour or so.
2. Buy a developer board from ClubIT that has the same motherboard as the Everex PC. Build it up with a 3.5″ HDD, then with a 2.5″ HDD, and then with either a CF card or a USB flash drive as the boot drive. Problem for the latter will be to figure out how to successfully boot off a USB drive or to hook up a CF card to the PATA interface.
3. Get the gOS to be able to save files to my Windows Home Server as a network share. This way I can use the big hard drives on my WHS in place of a native hard drive or the limited storage available from Google.

This may take a while to work through but I’ll try to blog my progress.