Just a couple of months ago, there was a big push for the Via PC-1 platform in my area (Southern California). I almost purchased one, to be used as the start of a low cost machine to run Smoothwall Express 3.0 on a regular basis.

You see, I have tried Smoothwall in the past, and each time I was very happy with it, and yet, each time a machine was dedicated to it, it became necessary to repurpose said machine.

This time I was going to build a machine that would stay a Smoothwall machine.

I have begun to look around, and can find nothing concerning the end-of-life of the platform, nor any problems with it from reviewers. As a matter of fact, I have seen that there were miniITX versions of the motherboard, along with the PC-2500 and PC-3500 mATX versions that I had under consideration. During the big push I mentioned above, there was no talk of the boards being closed out – the great pricing was supposed to be part of the PC-1 initiative. The PC-2500 was part of the Everex branded PC sold by WalMart at Christmas.

* I had included pictures here, but the system is still not rendering pictures – sorry.

The basic differences between the two are that the PC-3500 gave a PCIe slot, instead of the second PCI slot of the PC-2500, and the PC-3500 had (has?) no floppy drive controller.  Although the pictures don’t agree, the processor in shipping models was supposedly identical, having a 1.5GHz Via processor that was said to be sufficient for many duties. In fact, the Via web site (Taiwan) states that the PC-3500 is capable of running Vista, with addition of an outboard video card. Probably not well, but the boards are capable of using up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM.

I can find these nowhere now, only references to them. Has anyone else gotten any experience with this board? Also, any ideas why it’s not available now?

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Technorati Tags: Via platform - PC-1 initiative - PC-2500 - PC-3500 - green computing - Smoothwall Express