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As broadband connections gets more and more a commodity in the every mans home, there is a growing demand among some populations to set up servers of their own. This can be for file sharing services like Direct Connect, FTP, Webservers, gameservers, etc. Windows is an extremely poor server OS; no matter if you download all patches the same moment they becomes available, it's still full of holes and after a couple of months you will have to reinstall the whole thing. Linux is a good server OS (if you have the patience to learn it). But then there is the noise problem. A server often needs to be connected 24/7 to serve its purpose, and many people are living in apartments, some in large apartments where they can put their computer in a closed room, but others lives in small apartments where they perhaps have their computer in their living room or their bedroom. Noise can be a problem there. Take a Pegasos2 G3, a Seagate Barracuda, a silent Nexus PSU and you have a server that is *totally silent*. You can even put it under your bed, and it won't disturb your sleep. You will have to check the Power LED to see if it's actually powered on. The only x86 counterpart I can think of is the VIA Epia motherboard, not with the C3 processor, but with the fanless Eden processor. While that one is cheaper (the low price being its only real advantage), it also is quite weak when it comes to performance (especially if one would compare it to a fanless 7447A G4). The MiniITX form factor will also limit you if you want to add PCI hardware to your server, especially if you are using the computer as a combined router and server and thus needs to occupy the only PCI slot with an extra Ethernet card. No way of adding extra IDE controllers and such. The Pegasos2 has everything it needs to be used as a router, out of the box, while still leaving three PCI slots free for future use. Furthermore, I can't think of a single mainstream x86 motherboard that has Gigabit Ethernet implemented the way the Pegasos has; directly into the Northbridge and not through the PCI bottleneck. A fast Gigabit network is extremely nice to have in your LAN, trust me!

I have showed my Pegasos server to some friends of mine, who are quite seriously into what we can call "file sharing" (hrmm ), and they all were impressed. They themselves have had to rebuild wardobes inside walk-in closets to function as little server rooms (and similar), in order to avoid being thrown out by their girlfriends because of the noise their x86 servers makes. No need to say they were quite impressed by the Pegasos, both by the performance, but most by the silence. The price is not an issue to them; the current price tag is not *that* high really; they all have jobs, they take their computing hobby seriously, and we all have x86 machines that costs a lot more than the Pegasos. What I think it's stopping them is more a feeling of uncertainty; the Pegasos is young and unknown, it's hard to find if you want to buy one, and not a lot of info is available on a broad scale (except from pegasosppc.com and such). They think the Pegasos hardware is *excellent* as a server box, they *love* the silence, they think the price is acceptable, but they still hecitate, probably because of the "un-established" status of the Pegasos. (BTW, the "IBM" logos and such things you mentioned may be small components in a process of lowering this uncertainty; familiar logos alone are of course not enough, but it may help together with other things).