Thoughts On The New Mini PC

It's an Oumax Mini PC (not an affiliate link), for what that's worth -- I suspect most Chinese Mini PCs are made at the same factories, to pretty much the same specs, with very minor differences in appearance/branding and maybe the occasional weird thing to cater to a perceived market niche (on this one, two Ethernet ports is the weird thing).

So far, so good.

This one came with Windows 11 pre-installed, so that part only took about three times as long to set up and get running as it took to then install and configure Linux Mint on another partition. So this time I have a dual boot machine instead of native Linux (or just booting from a USB drive, wiping Windows, and installing Linux, without ever having to interact with Windows).

I haven't bothered to run any benchmark apps on the thing, but I'm getting good speed, reasonable CPU temperatures, etc. out of its Intel Alder Lake four-core CPU. Other than the installed 16Gb of RAM being its maximum, I've got no complaints so far. It's more than enough computer for the kind of work I do.

Well, I've got complaints with Windows, but I only plan to use that OS to run some older games when I'm in the mood (every few months I get an urge). I instantly installed Starcraft and will probably play a campaign episode a day for a little while, but that's about it.

As mentioned, just getting the "pre-installed" Windows 11 set up took far longer than installing and setting up Linux Mint, and as for using it, it looks to me like Windows has become so unduly complicated since, say, Windows 98, that it's just not worth the time it would take to get used to for anything else. I hate to even use it for games, because booting into it our logging out of it tends to become a "Windows is updating, come back in three hours" thing.

Depending on what Bitcoin does, etc., my next computing upgrade may involve upgrading from my two 19" TVs as monitors to two 24" TVs as monitors. I looked at prices yesterday, and they seem to be in the $60 range. Perhaps cheaper on clearance after Christmas. I never thought I really needed larger monitors, but I have room for them and maybe I'd like that better. We'll see.

My first computer cost, IIRC, $95 plus sales tax ... and that was in, IIRC, 1982. It was a Commodore VIC-20 with 4.5 kilobytes of RAM and a 1.x megahertz eight-bit CPU, which required a special digital tape recorder for storage (not included). Accordingg to an online inflation calculator, that's $310.76 in 2024 dollars. I paid $129 plus sales tax for this computer -- with a 500 Gb solid state drive included. So the price seems pretty damn right.