MiniPC brilliant at €162

Hi there
I just bought another minipc - these things are brilliant for what they are -- this one with an Amazon discount of €85 (That's why it's worth being a member of Amazon Prime -- not bothered about Prime video or music but FREE deliveries and often great coupons -- far better than the usual "Black Friday junk") cost was only €162 - with W11 PRO already included and 3.2 GHZ for the CPU - apart from the fact that the full retail cost of W11 pro is around the same value these boxes - with the 12th gen of Intel processor, 3X USB3, 2 or 3 4K UHD HDMI ports, fast Wifi, 2 LAN slots and fast DDR 4 RAM plus internal NVME M2 SSD type and small space to insert a classical 2.5 inch SSD drive if you want more internal storage - how can one complain. These things make brilliant file servers, NAS boxes (easy to install Linux on them BTW), Virtual Machine box, or whatever.

I'd even suggest if you have to buy a retail version of W11 PRO why not get one of these boxes -- extract the W11 proi and then flog the box to one of your mates.

I rarely use a laptop any more -- big clunky and heavy. I don't even use the HDMI cables any nore as I use now (also rarely mentioned - but can be had cheaply) HDMI Tx and Rx device pair - so no thick HDMI cables around and certainly no perceptable lag with the video.

OK you need to have your own keyboard, mouse and monitor - but I'd imagine most do anyway.

Really recommendable -- at least for typical workloads -- extreme gaming mighyt neet more "poke" thougħ. So probably for those people a "classical" gaming desktop or other specialized laptop might still be the order of the day.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

I'd even suggest if you have to buy a retail version of W11 PRO why not get one of these boxes -- extract the W11 proi and then flog the box to one of your mates.

Click to expand...

Have you checked the install key it's using? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a MAK license.

Winuser said:

Have you checked the install key it's using? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a MAK license.

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All the Mini PCs I have gotten have been legit Win 11 Pro keys. First thing I do with any new Mini PC is make a backup disk image, export all the drivers, then reinstall Windows from scratch to make sure it activates properly. Never had an issue with that.

hsehestedt said:

All the Mini PCs I have gotten have been legit Win 11 Pro keys. First thing I do with any new Mini PC is make a backup disk image, export all the drivers, then reinstall Windows from scratch to make sure it activates properly. Never had an issue with that.

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Just out of curiosity, what brand are your Mini PCs?

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
I just bought another minipc - these things are brilliant for what they are -- this one with an Amazon discount of €85 (That's why it's worth being a member of Amazon Prime -- not bothered about Prime video or music but FREE deliveries and often great coupons -- far better than the usual "Black Friday junk") cost was only €162 - with W11 PRO already included and 3.2 GHZ for the CPU - apart from the fact that the full retail cost of W11 pro is around the same value these boxes - with the 12th gen of Intel processor, 3X USB3, 2 or 3 4K UHD HDMI ports, fast Wifi, 2 LAN slots and fast DDR 4 RAM plus internal NVME M2 SSD type and small space to insert a classical 2.5 inch SSD drive if you want more internal storage - how can one complain. These things make brilliant file servers, NAS boxes (easy to install Linux on them BTW), Virtual Machine box, or whatever.

I'd even suggest if you have to buy a retail version of W11 PRO why not get one of these boxes -- extract the W11 proi and then flog the box to one of your mates.

I rarely use a laptop any more -- big clunky and heavy. I don't even use the HDMI cables any nore as I use now (also rarely mentioned - but can be had cheaply) HDMI Tx and Rx device pair - so no thick HDMI cables around and certainly no perceptable lag with the video.

OK you need to have your own keyboard, mouse and monitor - but I'd imagine most do anyway.

Really recommendable -- at least for typical workloads -- extreme gaming mighyt neet more "poke" thougħ. So probably for those people a "classical" gaming desktop or other specialized laptop might still be the order of the day.

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

Have you got a link for it ?

Is it something like this?

£229 and £50 off voucher

Winuser said:

Just out of curiosity, what brand are your Mini PCs?

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Mine are mostly from the same group: AceMagic, AceMagician, Kamrui, and AOC. I have roughly 8 or 9 from them. I also have one MoreFine.

Winuser said:

Just out of curiosity, what brand are your Mini PCs?

Click to expand...

@Winuser

@SIW2
Similar sort of deal -- no tax (VAT) levied on "Educational items" here so a bit cheaper - mine were flown in from Germany. (Iceland in EEA so in customs union etc so no probs with getting stuff from EU without extra hold ups for paperwork - got 2 day delivery which is fine for that type of stuff as it's unlikely to be stored locally)/

NIPOGI ones - with N100 and N97 CPU's - The N97 is actually a faster GEN 12 celeron CPU than the N100 which was GEN 11 -- but that was the ist one -- I've got 3 now - very happy - they've replaced two old HP Gen8 servers (around 8 -10 years old) and occupy much less space and consume a fraction of the power.

I got 3 of the same brand as then I'd have no trouble with drivers, hardware,software variations - quite happy since the ist one I bought (the older one) has been running 24/7 for quite a while now without any problems - overheating not a problem either and really minimal noise too.

I have 2X RSTECH dual bay ports to attach older HDD's on them - they work perfectly OK with even large capacity HDD's (2X 16 TB drives) too.

The 3rd one I just use as a 2nd basic home pc -- it's 100% fine for daily tasks and runs a VM on it too. I have a laptop and an older desktop for special testing / other things --I'm not a gamer so these are just perfect. I can't understand why more of these aren't mentioned -- as well as HDMI wireless Transmitter / Receiver pair to minimize thick HDMI cable use. !!

And of course image the system before adding own apps / replacing the OS (a legit W11 PRO system) .

I use Linux on 2 of them with a Windows VM on each with Native Windows on the 3rd one. Installing Linux is easy enough - seems no problem with hardware either.

Very little discussion on these bit from my experience unless you are a serious gamer these tiny things are just great .

Incidentally there's a nice bracket supplied for some users who might like to bolt the thing to a monitor so they don't need to see it on a desk at all -- depends on your workload and requirements.

Cheers

jimbo

jimbo45 said:

I rarely use a laptop any more -- big clunky and heavy. I don't even use the HDMI cables any nore as I use now (also rarely mentioned - but can be had cheaply) HDMI Tx and Rx device pair - so no thick HDMI cables around and certainly no perceptable lag with the video.

Click to expand...

Even a miniPC is a bit heavy and awkward to lug from room to room! I use casting to send video to my TV

kelper said:

Even a miniPC is a bit heavy and awkward to lug from room to room! I use casting to send video to my TV

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Heavy ??? These things are small enough to fit into ONE HAND -- are you sure you are talking about the same devices.



Cheers
jimbo

Well, you would also need the monitor, keyboard and mouse!

kelper said:

Well, you would also need the monitor, keyboard and mouse!

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I*'d assume most would have those already !!!

Obviously if you haven''t got those then this isn't a solution but for loads who have those then this is a good deal. In any case a wireless mouse and keyboard combo costs peanuts so that's not normally a problem and it's only the monitor that might be an issue.


Cheers
jimbo

But I like to move from room to room and love my lightweight, fanless laptop. Each to his own of course but I will never buy another computer that's not a laptop. I did love the tower computer I had has all the components could be accessed without tools.
I'm so pleased I figured out decades ago that all the components were made to standard sizes.
At one time my tower computer had two HDDs, a tape drive and two FDDs for easy copying. I later added a CD-RW device.
If I had a spare room I would buy a desktop just tp 'play' with all the options such as water cooling.

TVs these days have built-in browser and network streamer, what do you use the mini-PC for?
If you're upgrading an old TV, that is the way to go. Or android boxes.

I'd rather pull all my own teeth than use my TV's browser! There is no mouse, no proper keyboard; it's an exercise in self-flagellation.

kelper said:

I'd rather pull all my own teeth than use my TV's browser! There is no mouse, no proper keyboard; it's an exercise in self-flagellation.

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Most built in TV apps are diabolical -- Even when Netflix and Amazon Prime is built in. I find installing KODI on the latest firestick which already has Netflic and Amazon installed and plugging the firestick into a TV's HDMI slot is light years faster than the built in apps on the TV. Kodi also allows me to stream content from remote computers or play video / music even from ripped DVD's without needing any multi-media server running on the remote machines -- just simple shared files via bog standard file sharing (windows) or SAMBA (SMB) if content is on a Linux remote NAS.

Note on the latest firesticks you have to do a little trick to enable sideloading of apps.

Here's a link to my post on how to do it :


Cheers
jimbo