My Dad's all in one PC has died as of today, he wants a NUC type form factor or mini-itx prebuilt, any advice welcome

[A Computer Guy]

@ixi so here is the update, I got it all installed and setup, I ended up doing a clean install of Win 11 on it, its similar to a laptop in that the key is saved inside the BIOS, so you don't have to enter in a windows 11 key or anything if you stay on the same OS. so I did a clean install of Windows 11, updated chipset, graphics, and latest intel wifi drivers, reboot, let win 11 update everything, reboot a few times.

got all my dads stuff backed up put back in the way he likes, everything was honestly really smooth and fast. I went to youtube ran a few popular channels at full 4k on my dads 1080p, not only does it run 4k youtube perfectly smooths it doesn't even need a microsecond to buffer, the ddr5 ram and wifi6 and nvme drive combined with the alder lake ecores are powerful enough to make it all seamless. i even opened up 2 4k youtube videos, let them both play and picked random areas in the videos on both... not a single moment of hesitation (not even a 0.2 second buffer wait period thanks to the wifi 6 I am guessing). this thing is insane for the price. lmao. i'm trying to convince my mom to upgrade her rig now and get rid of that giant tower i built her like 10 years ago. she is like my Dad just does basic web browsing and youtube. honestly impressed by this little thing, it looks great, has 5 usb 3.0 ports and 1 type c. it even has a 2.5gb lan and a 1gb lan port...

best bang for buck there is. AMD blew its lead on the APU market cause there are a whole lot of fucking people out there my dads age that just want something basic, but snappy for a really good price. this damn thing can't be be beat. flawless experience.

edit: it does have 512gb storage as well, which is impressive for this price. and overkill for what my dad needs.

Similar experience with my mom. After I had seen this video about a year ago on MinisForum HM80 I was keeping my eye out for sales and we happened to get it on sale about $250 w/ 32GB RAM + 512GB SSD which seemed like an amazing deal at the time.

I was really impressed how good that APU's are at such low wattages and even having 16 threads so my mom could have many browser tabs open for days.

I'm going to be sad when these little boxes dominate the market and custom pc building becomes extinct from all the GPU silicon going to server AI chips.

 

[cvaldes]

I'm going to be sad when these little boxes dominate the market and custom pc building becomes extinct from all the GPU silicon going to server AI chips.

Don't worry, Nvidia and AMD will keep a few discrete graphics cards around for PC gaming, DIY hobbyists, business clients (3D modeling, game development, CAD/CAM, technical computing). Prices won't be cheap though due to supply and demand. I know some people love wallowing in gloom-and-doom misery but TSMC expects the AI-driven shortage of wafers to last 1.5 years -- not forever.

Every single component shortage eventually gets sorted out. It won't happen overnight but even webcams -- so heavily in demand in the early months of the pandemic lockdowns -- are now plentiful and affordably priced.

But circling back to the original topic, one extra benefit of my Beelink S12 was the absence of bloatware installed by the manufacturer. This saved me 15-20 minutes of annoying system administration cleaning up the normal 3rd party skankware.

The only thing that the Beelink had were platform specific drivers for Intel. I didn't even find some useless customer service app that phoned home to Beelink. No Norton, Sonic Studio, Nahimic stuff. No pestering popups offering to install Google Chrome, VPNs, games, etc. Not even browser bookmarks or a desktop icon pointing back to the Beelink website. Nothing, nada. It is just a virgin Windows 11 Pro installation + platform drivers.

Sadly, there's still tons of garbage that Microsloth includes with Winblows. No way to get around that.

MacOS/OS X is so refreshingly clean as an OOB experience compared to Windows from a system administration perspective.