**The Ultimate Mini-Boss - Intel's Compute Stick - Available for Pre-Order Now! **

This looks interesting and could potentially be useful for our bedroom TV, which we never currently use since our terrestrial TV reception is so poor and it's no longer hooked up to anything else. But I do have a portable hard-drive with a lot of 720p xvid/h.264 media files (a few 1080p ones too, but not too many since I usually encode to 720p as that's the res of our main plasma TV) - how would this device be at playing those back?

Oh, I guess it wouldn't power a portable HDD itself, though, but I could maybe get USB power for it from the TV's USB port if needed.
 
lamboman said:
As quite a few others have said, those who want a more powerful alternative to a Chromecast, but also businesses who only require minimal power for office work, browsing etc, who previously would have bought a cheap PC bundle and would like new computers but want to recycle all the useful parts (peripherals and display).
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Not many of those businesses would have wireless keyboards compatible or displays with HDMI. Majority would probably want a physical LAN port too rather than using WIFI...

As a temporary display/POS/troubleshooting/boardroom PC it would work well though.

JasonM said:
Over time these will become more powerful with more storage and memory. 10 years from now where someone would use a budget PC, they will just purchase these off the shelf.
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10 years? Try 3-4! The desktop market is already 30% mini/micro PC's.

But I feel this is aimed at more the home user who wants a living room PC/PC in their bedroom. Really makes a lot of the TV streaming/catchup services which require a device (Amazon Fire/NowTV/NetFlix) less appealing.
 
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Would be great as a POS peice of equipment indeed.

My dads old office (about 4 years ago) all had all-in-one's, they just had these atom type (or whatever it was back then) CPUs in with crappy 17 inch 720p screens. These things would have been even cheaper to have with a nice big screen.

Would just have loved to see 4gb of ram instead of 2gb and maybe 2 USB ports. 1 for power, connected via the monitor and another to use with USB sticks or something. Sure it has a SD card slot, but who carries work around on one of those over a USB?!

EDIT: Can you sort out a bundle with this at all? Maybe a 32gb SD card along side a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo??

EDIT 2:
The Compute Stick can't draw power over HDMI, which means you'll need to keep it plugged in to power via its Micro-USB port.
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So you do have a spare USB port! You can use the micro USB port connected to your TVs USB port for power and still have a spare USB to use for something (Xbox wireless receiver for 4 player micromachines on a Ps1 emulator!).
 
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Yeah a LAN port would be nice but that kinds of defeats the point of "portable". I guess it isn't really that portable when you take into account the different cables, keyboard, mouse etc.

So yeah for the next revision a LAN port and AC wifi wouldn't be bad to have among other things.

Still it's a nice start and I see myself buying one when I've got the dosh!
 
gradyhawks said:
So you do have a spare USB port! You can use the micro USB port connected to your TVs USB port for power and still have a spare USB to use for something (Xbox wireless receiver for 4 player micromachines on a Ps1 emulator!).
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It won't power via USB. I have the same chipset in a little settop box and it requires 3A power supply.
 
Seems a bit pricey compared to a Raspberry PI which can do pretty much everything this can. I suppose you can have windows on it, but only 8GB storage? Not sure that windows would fit on that :p
 
thebennyboy said:
Seems a bit pricey compared to a Raspberry PI which can do pretty much everything this can. I suppose you can have windows on it, but only 8GB storage? Not sure that windows would fit on that :p
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The 32Gb windows version comes with windows 8.1 I believe.

£130 for a fully functioning PC with windows is a bargain.
 
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thebennyboy said:
Seems a bit pricey compared to a Raspberry PI which can do pretty much everything this can. I suppose you can have windows on it, but only 8GB storage? Not sure that windows would fit on that :p
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It is FAR more capable, I bought an RPi2 and sold it within a week, it is too slow to do anything meaningful with it.

I bought 32GB one of these, stuck Windows 10 on it and never looked back.
 
I thought this was ocuk? Why has none of you asked if it will overclock? And if so, how much lol.
I don't wanna hear about Linux distros, I wanna see 6ghz compute sticks
 
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