For the last few years, desktop PC has lost business to the laptop PC due to the portability, mobility and smaller size of the latter.  By now, we would expect desktop and laptop to have an equal share of the market and collectively own the PC market. Net-top PC emerged last year and has been a rising star.  Net-top is a small cousin of laptop and laptop is already small.  Would the smaller net-top be of real use?  This is a valid question as a laptop is not as powerful as a desktop.  The answer is that net-top is a low power laptop with a small screen and is suitable for students and some low end applications.  This situation has prompted the PC industry to revisit smaller form factors for desktop PC as well.

Compucon has since released an Onyx Small PC series. Onyx is about 1/3 of the size of Compucon Diamond or Jasper, but not necessarily in performance.  It has 6 litres of volume whereas Diamond has 17 litres.  There are 3 flavours of Onyx- commercial for standard office applications, multimedia for rich audio & video applications, and industrial for multiple serial data links.  Onyx can take an add-on card or more than one hard disk.  It can be mounted on the wall or underneath the desktop.  In terms of computational abilities, it can take an Intel Core2 Dual CPU with 2 GB of memory.  It is not a weak machine at all.  Most important of all, Onyx is compatible with open industry standards and does not lock customers into any proprietary components for future maintenance or upgrade.  Please see this URL for more details and contact the editor if you need further information.  Onyx is designed to be a reliable productivity tool, not a toy.  http://www.compucon.co.nz/content/view/501/215