ASUS is re-tooling its Eee Box nettop PC with a Celeron CPU, larger hard drive, and a price cut. The move is apparently to stimulate year-end sales, with the new package priced at $240, sixty dollars less than the existing Eee Box system. Although the Celeron will run at 1.2GHz, below the Atom's 1.6GHz, the Celeron is a much more capable processor, able to extract more performance per clock cycle than the Atom. It will be interesting to see if the price-cutting measure ends up boosting performance, with the cost of a system that uses more electricity. The hard drive bump is a much more minor change, moving from 80GB to 120GB. ASUS also plans to offer an all-in-one package, bundling in a 19-inch LCD monitor with the new Eee Box for a cost of $355. Does this change make the nettop an attractive-enough buy, or are you more likely to hold out for sub-$200 nettops? Let us know what you think in the comments.

This story around the web: