Presentation, Bundle and Manuals
Shuttle eschew the white, grey and ginger tones of recent XPC boxes in favour of a 70s-inspired purple and gold livery, replete with naked ladies doing unspeakable things to a Photoshop'd facsimilie of David Hasselhoff.
ONLY JOKING!! Given the number of XPCs I've seen in recent months with bugger all difference in the overall presentation, you can forgive me writing something a little off the wall about how an XPC will arrive with you.
Inside the box, apart from the ST20G5 itself, is a power cord for the area of the world you live in, and the XPC Basics. That endearing term is one I've come to apply to what's just a white box with a few cables, manuals and the odd CD and floppy disk inside. While that's all you need with an XPC, since they're designed to be easy to use with Shuttle doing all the hard work in terms of major integration for you, it still feels a little on the lite side.
There's a manual for the FT20 mainboard, one for the XPC in general and one for the SATA RAID controller that has a home on the ULi M1573 chip. Each is well done, full of well-taken photographs and simple language explaining them, along with easy-to-read text that gives you the information that you need to get one of Shuttle's itty-bitty barebones XPCs up and running. It's been a long time since I've had cause to say bad things about Shuttle in terms of documentation, and I wont start again here.
There's a basic driver and utility CD for the XPC, too, which gives you all the correct drivers for the hardware, for either Windows XP or Windows 2003. The menu system on the CD that presents you with the drivers even places them in the right order. Install them from top to bottom. The other pictured CD has copies of the welcome Trend Micro PC-Cillin (what a rubbish name for anti-virus software) 2004, the distinctly mediocre Muvee autoProducer 3.1 (yay for the utter mangling of the word movie, as if they'd hired me to brand their software) for creating video DVDs and the like and a copy of the lottery-like Adobe Acrobat Reader v6.0 (usually complete crap depending on the minor build version you happen to install and now superceded by the equally pathetic Acrobat Reader v7.0).
Not the value-added software bundle I'd liked to have seen. Just press a CD with stuff like Firefox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the GIMP, and other software that our Free and Open Source Software bloke, Jo, would froth at the mouth if he saw bundled with a product. Free software that's useful, rather than yet another DVD authoring pishfest and a copy of Adobe Unspeakable. The anti-virus software is welcome, though, despite the name that's sillier than my own.
With the hardware considered, the presentation pondered and the bundle examined, we've got time too look askance at the ST20G5's BIOS screens that you'll no doubt poke before you install an OS, to make sure everything's setup correctly.
