Mini / stick pc ? Any good?

sev112

im looking for the cheapest pc I can find, used or new, to do very little except surf internet and run a couple of pieces of simple software which I can’t run on iOS (I use ipad for all other computing)

thoughts / suggestions?

am toying with getting a 10 year old Sony laptop up and running vista again to see if it will fit the bill but wondered whether I’d get extra value from say a memory stuck pc, as it is capable of more

Snags

Probably depends on the "couple of pieces of simple software".

Would strongly suggest not using Vista under any circumstances, though. W7 or W10, nothing in between.

notanon

You will be pushed to find anything that beats

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrunchBang_Linux

with respect to resources. It depends on what software you intend to run.

darthed1981

Snags said:

Probably depends on the "couple of pieces of simple software".

Would strongly suggest not using Vista under any circumstances, though. W7 or W10, nothing in between.

Worth bearing in mind W7 loses it's security updates early next year.

So a W10 device is the way to go at this point.

Axe_meister

An Atomic Pi if you can find one in this country.
$35 for a 4 core Atom processor (x86) and can run Windows

guitartango

Axe_meister said:

An Atomic Pi if you can find one in this country.
$35 for a 4 core Atom processor (x86) and can run
 Windows

I doubt you can run the latest Window's 10 on this device, you would run out of disc space within weeks

MikeB

I'd try a Linux distros on the old laptop. Plenty to choose and depending on the little bits of software you need, would do what you want.

digitalscream

The problem with those stick PCs isn't the CPU power (although it's pretty lacking, and they usually feel about the same speed as a budget tablet). It's the storage - not only isn't there a lot of it, it's slow. eMMC just isn't a high-speed medium.

I just picked up a barebone Gigabyte Brix PC with an i5 CPU from eBay for £140. £20 on an m.2 128GB SSD and about the same on 8GB low-voltage DDR3, and it's steaming along. Small, quiet, cheap...what's not to love?

You have to hunt around a bit to get the good deals, but if you're not bothered about a low-powered CPU then you can pick up the quad-core Celeron ones for £80-90.

For what it's worth, mine's getting Ubuntu, Reaper and Helix Native on it - I'm building a cheap backup for my Helix