Everything's USB these days, so the printer and scanner fit right in, as do the wireless keyboard/mouse.

Looks a Mac Mini but with all the hassle of Windows.

Funny, that's exactly how I see Macs. Your experience may vary.

Anyway, this is a Windows thread. If you want to discuss Macs, be my guest - in your own thread!

Hello again, the Gigabyte BRIX is up and running. It's pretty damned impressive considering the tiny size and lack of heat output. Real-world impression is that it's faster than my 6-core AMD big box, and very fast indeed in boot time and generally doing stuff. So what have I sacrificed in going small?



So compared with the big box, it gains on single-threading (i.e. most software) which you may expect for an i7 with turbo boost, and it loses on multi-threading but by much less than I expected against a 6-core CPU.  On business graphics it's fine, on video it has hardware assist but it's hopeless on 3D (fine, I don't play computer games).  On storage speed, it's in a different class with the NVMe SSD killing the SATA based one.  The overall effect is even better than I had hoped for, no loss of performance in any area that I use.

That is ridiculously small

Hadn't clocked the size before

Yes, a tiny one in the gubbins. Even hammering it last night for a couple of hours while syncing my OneDrive files, it was very quiet. In normal use I don't notice it at all.

My old Dell went tits up at the weekend after occasional freezing. Judging by the lights and disconnecting and removing the RAM/drives it likely is the mother board - won't even go to Post. Anyway looked for something cheap to replace that was adequate. Went for a Lenovo Ideacentre as it is under £200. They don't appear to do the Core 3i processor in them any more and those available have a pretty weedy 1.6ghz celeron. Actually it performs pretty much on a par with win 8.1 to the old 3ghz pentium with vista. Thinking is this is designed for portability and can plug in your tv using Hdmi. So a good stop gap that takes up no room - will build a more powerful mini computer at a later date. This comes with a proper keyboard and mouse now which is not stated in sellers listings. Also has 4gb Ram and 64 bit windows. Running 8.1 at present and will leave 10 upgrade when I get all my legacy software running. At present can't get my old printer scanner which dates back to 98/XP to work properly (can do basic print function). So a new printer scanner may be next buy. Why TF can't Microsoft make it easy to run older perfectly good hardware when they change operating system.

It means tons of working and still adequate kit gets dumped. Not a good thing. This is costly for business. Fortunately small printers are fairly cheap and they make the money on the ink if you are daft enough to use the manufacturer's own product. Always found third party ink cartridges work perfectly in Epsons and don't appear to shorten life. 

Generally W8.1 drivers will carry through to W10. Not sure about the fax/scan app. I'm lucky and managed to get the Canoscan app to work for my LIDE 80, as well as (amazingly) found a driver for my trusty old HP1020 laser printer.