Perhaps you can use ReadyBoost and use a flashdrive as extra ram for this purpose.

or just get a compu stick and stick it in a hdmi screen
its a lot cheaper at any rate

Yeah I looked at some of the stick PCs but they lack ports, I like the idea of getting an external hard-drive eventually. They seem a bit flimsy too, though the ASUS Vivostick looked alright.

We sort of have Black Friday in Australia, but we mainly have Boxing Day sales just after Christmas. I'm not in a rush since I have a laptop in the meantime so I might wait and see what pops up.

Another thought I had was to get a cheap Chinese tablet and use a mini-HDMI cable + bluetooth M&K. There's something cool about a simple mini-PC though.

I've got an early generation (about 4 years old now) Celeron NUC for watching films on the big screen.
It works well enough

Is there some specific reason you want a mini-PC, and not e.g. a cheapo laptop? To me it seems that the cheapest laptops are about the same price as that mini-PC, and include their own monitors (screen) and keyboards.

In that budget, with a quick search I would personally rather get something like this (not sure how much that costs in US or Australia):

https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/65928/hfgvn/HP-Notebook-14-am009no-14-kannettava-Win-10-hopea

It has 4GB RAM, Intel Celeron CPU etc. Personally though, I'd get a "proper" laptop that houses a real hard drive (or SSD) rather than a "eMMC hard drive". Like in your mini-PC, that HP laptop also has mere 32GB storage space (eMMC SSD). I'd rather buy some 300€ laptop with e.g. a 500GB or at least a 320GB hard drive. Storage space is the last place where I want to be skimpy, even with my Android phones.

Well certainly I wouldn't expect the Pi to run Windows 10. I mentioned it was mostly for browsing and simple tasks. A $25 computer, although it seemed to be a little slow for my tastes (at least the Xbox Media Player), it does do native Mpeg4 decoding (although some videos were glitchy so not sure if it could to AVC).

The OS is free, although you have to partition a SD card for it, and if you wanted more ports get a dedicated powered USB hub, which can then feed power to the Pi. Unless you're emulating SNES or earlier emulators, it probably isn't a good match.

All in all not a bad system that's tiny and low powered.

I still need to look into getting a Rasperry Pi, for a dedicated low-power gogrepo.py PC that downloads my GOG games for me. Running Linux for that purpose is fine, even preferable.

But for that I need to be able connect at least these things to the Rasperry:

- Some kind of monitor (my HDTV would be fine too I guess, with HDMI). I don't like typing blind, too many typing errors occur.

- Some sort of keyboard and mouse.

- USB hard drive, possibly even two. If only one, then it has to support bigger HDDs, e.g. 4 terabytes.

not everybody is so inclined to tinker
some times people just want something that works with an OS they know and does what they want from it with the least amount of fuss

though personally i would also go for a laptop for that money easier more streamlined self contained
decent screen and better specs

Maybe I have been lucky because I haven't had such issues with various laptops. Or maybe the Finnish climate is so cool that it is theoretically impossible for laptops to overheat here.

Ok I had overheating issues with two work laptops, but they occurred when they were quite old already (maybe around 8 years if not more) and at least one of them had a broken fan at that point.

Once set up you don't need a monitor, just connect to it via a SSH shell.

I've got a few headless machines in our home.

Yeah i guess I could set up SSH, installing putty on my Windows PC etc. etc... The device having its own screen and input devices just felt like the most straightforward solution, not having to figure out how I can get a connection between two PCs on my home network (do ports need to be forwarded on the router or does it manage to connect "directly" etc.).

Hmm, of course I could try that already now since I am using an old Linux laptop for running gogrepo. So to check how easily I can connect to it with ssh from this Windows PC.

Ps. Do you shut down the headless machines via ssh (givng a shuitdown command from command line), or do you keep them powered up all the time?

Now I am starting to think that if the headless machine didn't have any monitor, I might actually prefer a graphical connection (remote desktop etc.). I recall I have occasionally run also e.g. some graphical p2p client on that PC. So in that sense too having its own display device and input devices would be more straightforward...

It's still a crap shoot. Especially now that newer CPUs (and probably other components) rely on heavy boosting & throttling to stay within the thermal budget. It might not overheat to the point where damage is done, but it will get hot and it will throttle and you will lose performance.

Laptop fans still get noisy if you tax the computer.
I prefer to keep my servers running 24/7, and if I have to shutdown, I usually have a bunch of stuff running on it that I want to close & save before I do. So over ssh, yes. But if I know I have no unsaved stuff, I could just press the power button.

Our headless machines run 24/7

Our WoW server runs Win7 Pro and can be accessed via remote desktop. All Pro versions of Windows can be run headless and connected to via Terminal Services using the Remote Desktop Viewer.


I've decommissioned our linux file server in favour of a second NAS box, but that was Administrated either by WebMin http://www.webmin.com/ for via a SSH command.

With SSH you can do something really cool. Run a xWindow from the Server on the client and it look like a local window.

https://www.asus.com/au/Notebooks/ASUS-VivoBook-E402SA/specifications/

they start at $200 Aud refub, free postage to your door... http://www.cfonline.com.au/index.php?route=product/category&path=79&sort=p.price&order=ASC