I’ve been looking at getting a small PC to run the new big TV and basically take care of the media stuff.  The big system does a very good job of driving the TV, but me being me another PC would be better.

I looked at a few options and landed upon the AOpen products, and then found the new GP7A-HD which is currently only available in Japan, and maybe a few other counries now.

There is a very new product and not alot of info is available about it so I thought I would share my experience so far.

The flashy promostuff can be found here on the global AOpen site.

And the different model specs are here:

Finding the actual parts in Tokyo proved to be alot more complex that I expected.  Even Akihabara failed me here!  The ever increasing ordering online is slowly killing off Akihabara.

I printed out the shopping list of parts (from the AOpen site) which proved to a be damn good idea.  The japanese site gave a list of shops that stocked the unit.  One was Bic Camera in Ginza which is just up the train line from me so confidence was high.

Alas it was a bit premature.  After some success in finding the actual unit in Bic Camera (success) they did not stock the memory, the hard drive, or processor.  Okay so off to Akihabara and the ever trusty Yodabashi Camera Superstore, and it went down hill from there.  Next stop TZone DIY, and no processor, nor a clue where to find it.  I did pick up the memory and hard drive from there.  (for an extra 200yen you get a compatibility return on the memory – not a bad idea either).

After trying a few more store it became apparent that finding the P-Socket process was going to be a real issue.  Luckyly i had been checking this on Amazon.co.jp and they did have processor.  So back to Bic Camera to pickup the unit and half put it together.

Ordered the processor from Amazon and wait.