Mini PC to Replace Laptop Help

[King Tones]

Hi All,

Looking for some advice on replacing my HP Laptop with a Mini PC as I never take the Laptop anywhere and it's always plugged into the TV in the Office and always on the mains. Not had any issues with it but thought I would try and replace it with something smaller to make some room.

My Current Laptop specs are :

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4288U CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.60 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB

This is mainly used for browsing the web, some videos, backing up photos and files to either Cloud or Ext HDD and sometimes Plex and a few light games like Human Fall Flat and some XCloud.

I have been looking at the below as options but not idea if these would be worse, better or about the same.
Budget ideally is about £200 and I have a 2.5 SSD not being used at the moment along with a few Ext HDD's that are used as backups for media.
So storage is not really an issue.


This one is £140 with Voucher
Amazon product

This one is £156 with Voucher
Amazon product

This one is £220 with a Voucher
Amazon product

This one is £203
Amazon product

I have seen good reviews on the Beelink but not looked into the others much but all seem to be close on Spec.
Would these do the job or should I be looking for something else ?

Just looking for something a bit more efficient and something that potentially can be hooked onto the back of the TV and out of the way.

Thanks for any suggestions or help.

 

[next010]

There is a barebones mini PC with a Pentium Silver N6005 for around £200, going off passmark benchmarks it seems the better of the bunch vs the older celeron/pentiums.

It should be fine for most tasks you mention though I doubt its up to the task of 3D games on such a low end unit, the Pentium N6005 does have 4K video support.

 

[Monster900]

I bought one of these computers under the 'Suncall' brand. At the time it cost me about £150 when voucher discounts were applied, with a 128GB SSD installed. When it arrived it was actually branded 'AcePC' but was the same spec, so no problems.

Initially I was very pleased with it, but after about two months it started playing up and not booting reliably. Eventually it wouldn't boot at all and I tracked it down to the SSD having failed. I didn't return it because I always worry that it may burst back into life, once returned, with all my personal data on it. Fortunately, I had taken a Macrium Reflect disk image and had a spare Samsung SSD doing nothing so I restored the image to that, installed it and it worked again.

It was still not quite right with a slow boot and seemingly slower operation. I think it was still trying to access the original SSD, so I removed it. Once that was done it has operated really well again but we will see how long the rest of the components last.

Upshot for me is, they are really good for the money, when they work, but don't expect great reliability.

 

[Monster900]

Picture of the failed Mini PC SSD.

 

[King Tones]

Thanks for the advice, think I will get one at some point but hold off for a good price/deal and see if I can get something better. Having had a look at the links above though at least I know it will be as good or better than my again laptop and cover off most needs.

 

[FrankBT]

"...replacing my HP Laptop with a Mini PC as I never take the Laptop anywhere and it's always plugged into the TV in the Office and always on the mains. Not had any issues with it but thought I would try and replace it with something smaller to make some room."

Mini PCs are bigger than laptops!

 

[LV426]

For what it's worth, I have used laptops where my desktop box used to be pretty much exclusively for several years, hooked up to "desktop" peripherals. Here - to me - is the reason:

A laptop, by definition, has an onboard UPS so in the (perhaps unlikely) event of a power outage (even a brief one) you don't lose your unsaved work.

And that, put simply, is why I made, and will likely continue to make, this choice.