It’s been a while since I did any serious banging on our FX160 seed unit from Dell – mostly because I’ve had a lot of other things on my plate with considerably higher priority.
I’ve discovered that the FX160 with 1GB NVRAM is functionally useless if you want to do anything with it other than the standard out-of-the-box configuration (RDP, XenDesktop). Most applications these days are written for full XP and are consequently bloated bigger than a whale that’s been left on the beach too long. Hardware vendors seem to be particularly bad about this. I’m talking about YOU, nVidia and Creative. There is no reason a device driver for a USB Audio device should complain about disk space with 200MB free. Would a little code optimization kill you people?
My current experiment is to turn this device into a simple videoconferencing terminal, using a Sony EVI-D70 camera, a USB capture device from ADS, and a Creative QuickCall USB Speakerphone. Initial tests seem to be promising, although installing the Creative drivers is proving to be complicated due to its insatiable apetite for disk space, which seems to have been bypassed by manually extracting to the stick much like I had to do with .NET 3.5.