I think I paid about $150 for it. The model I have -- Intel Celeron N5095A @ 2.00GHz, 16Gb of RAM -- currently retails for $175. So even if I went through a machine of this type every year, it would probably cost less than both buying every 2-3 years, and running, a big tower. I really do love the tiny hardware platforms, and have ever since my first Chromebox 12 years ago and, before that, an old Mac Mini.
My main requirement, other than at least 16Gb of RAM and decent CPU performance, is that it needs to have two HDMI outputs for my monitors, and I'm seeing machines in the $150-$175 price range with those ports all over the place. If I want 32Gb of RAM and a 512Gb or 1Tb drive instead of 128Gb, $300-ish.
I'll be watching Black Friday specials, of course. If I go with the higher end, I'll probably just go ahead and get a Windows machine and devote most of its drive space to a Linux install. The only advantage to a dual-boot machine is that I can e.g. play Starcraft without either switching over to other hardware or trying to get Wine to emulate (I've always had problems with that).
I think my first step will be, over the holiday weekend, to physically open up the box, make sure everything is clean, then revert from my current OS (Linux Mint) to Lubuntu or some other light Linux distribution and see if the problems go away.
In extremis, I can always revert to my previous mini PC, which only has 8Gb of RAM and an inferior CPU, but which does, you know, work. It's a little slower, but it would see me through until I found something better. As would my old Raspberry Pi. Not an emergency. Just an opportunity for a blog post.
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