I’m not going to bother with photos of the object itself, there are plenty of those on the net, basically it fits in the palm of your hand and weighs nothing.
First disclaimer / caveat is the install media was a generic USB stick containing a win10 image created by Rufus, so it’s not the fastest data source on the planet.
Out of the packaging it tries to boot from the empty Plextor SSD fitted and throws an error, go into bios and select the USB stick as boot source and away we go… did a new install and “new” option partition on the SSD.
Didn’t time anything and was doing other stuff at the time, but just about 10 minutes to the first reboot and 15 minutes to the desktop, which I am not complaining about, and nor should you.
Took another 30 minutes to first install OO Shut Up and kill all the win10 processes I don’t want including update, then off to Ninite.com for a 1 click installer for all the utilities I wanted, then 10 minutes after that to install word and excel from office 2010.
Now the acid test, will it run a cnc machine, in this case a modern 2017 edition fibre galvo metal marking laser?
Not exactly a low bandwidth high latency friendly device…..
pic is a link to full size
So this is task manager with the cnc machine actually running a job, it is worth pointing out here that this is a headless box, so this screenshot was taken from an active RDP session as well, which adds a small overhead to the process.
Everything we need to know about the ability of this brix to do real work is answered right here, two cores are idle and the CNC process I bought it to run uses about 30% CPU (note it is pretty much all kernel time processing) s0 at first blush it is looking pretty much ideal for the role as a compact low power dedicated PC, but one which runs Win10 so you can install pretty much anything you want on it, and RDP in etc.
Caveats / Gotchas.
I deliberately used an older version of Win10, there is a 4.5 gig update available if you let it, I did not want this, I deliberately chose the earlier version of win10 and immediately locked it down from updating.
The version of win10 that I used left a whole bunch of things in device manager as unknowns, I do not know if the updated version would know about all these things, the box comes with a driver DVD which I just copied and pasted via RDP, so no big deal.
I used wifi for the install setup, one of the things that was unknown was the micro sd card slot reader, so maybe copy the DVD to another usb stick.
The box I bought has a proper RGB VGA 15 pin analog output to monitor as well as HDMI, a bunch of usb, audio, RJ45 network and the aforementioned micro sd card, and one power button on the top.
The *only* real caveats were the BIOS shipped looking for an OS on the blank Plextor SSD and so did not see the Rufus Win10 usb, which was easy fixed, and the version of win10 I used didn’t have drivers for many of the peripherals, and the drivers are supplied on DVD, which the box can’t see natively.
Far too early to talk about longevity and reliability and so on, it’s not industrial grade hardware, but early indications are it works out of the box so like most electronics it should continue to just work.
Bottom line is £250 quid including VAT is £200 excluding VAT if you are in business and can claim it back, and for £200 this brix represents some serious value for money, hell it would run an office desktop or make an ideal kids computer for homework and study, sure, it won’t play games punk, but you said you needed a computer to do school work, so fuck you.
But at 6-10 watts power consumption I see a real application here as a dedicated single task PC such as I have used it for here, it’s the sort of thing where if someone gave me 10 of them, I’d find a use for 5 of them within a week, and the others not long after.
The physical box stops it being a NAS, as does the mainboard itself, if you want that go MicroATX like the asus H81 or equivalent, it has the sata ports already on board, then all you need is a decent case (talked about my nas box on here before) so do not forget the form factor with this Brix.
Nor is it waterproof or suitable for harsh environments.
IMHO only a complete cunt would put a spinning rust HDD in one of these, SSD every time, no moving parts, more speed.
Complete windows backup image stored on the NAS is 14.5 gigs, so the 120 gig plextor SSD is more than big enough, and the 4 gig of installed ram is enough too.
Thumbs up from me, well pleased.
Why Windows 10 over 7? There is nothing lightweight about 10.
Comment by guest — October 25, 2017 @ 2:30 pm
Oh i guess driver supports, btw. a good script to lock down 10 is Ancile, or something simpler, Black Bird.
If you need all microshaft domains to blacklist, here they are.
And the best tool to customize/integrate stuff into Windows is NTLite.
Just fyi, cheers!
Comment by guest — October 25, 2017 @ 3:05 pm
Lightweight doesn’t matter once you are going x86, driver / API support does.
If lightweight mattered you’d go embedded CE and roll your own drivers etc IMHO
My 2c, YMMV etc
Comment by wimminz — October 25, 2017 @ 3:29 pm
At least get the LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) version of Windows 10 then.
Another pro tip, don’t post 4MB jpegs, the “save for web” feature in photoshop!
What is Windows 10 LTSB? From reddit:
“Take everything we loved about Windows 7, add the under-the-hood improvements of Windows 8 and 10 but none of the marketing/cloud/phone app/user-tracking crap, and what do you get? Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB edition.
No pre-installed nonremovable junk “apps” (Like Paint 3D, Xbox, Mixed Reality Portal,…) that waste storage space & resources by running in the background, no Edge, no Store, no Cortana.
Default built-in tools like calculator are the same that were in Windows 7.
More control over updates and upgrades; Windows Update is security and hotfixes only – no lame marketing-features being force installed.
No upselling. No “suggested apps”, no “Get Skype” button on the start menu that can’t be removed, no notification spam to “Try Office 365”.
Local account by default
The “telemetry” spying garbage can be completely disabled because LTSB is based on Windows 10 Enterprise”
It’s funny how “no telemetry” is considered an enterprise feature!
Comment by guest — October 26, 2017 @ 12:21 am
I’m not sure why you assume I wasn’t using LTSB (I was) or why reddit is the found of knowledge, OOshutup is IMHO required even *with* LTSB, sure, cortana and paint3d are not installed, but do not believe for a moment that LTSB by itself is win7 with better drivers.
Nothing however beats blackholing a work box at the firewall, as the old saying goes, but that no longer applies to win10, which *specifically* uses the LAN to share data as well, so if you have one LAN boxen that isn’t blackholed from the WAN, you’re wide open to “telemetry” and any as yet undisclosed spook back doors.
I firmly believe the future will take us back to acorn and riscos, where the OS is on EEPROM, it still doesn’t protect us from spook backdoors of course….. which brings us back to an active stateful firewall.
This is why I was so interested in the celeron based brix, it has the cpu power to be a stateful firewall unlike my drayteks, but first I have to soak test it as a dedicated work pc and see how it goes.
Comment by wimminz — October 26, 2017 @ 11:38 pm
What’s your take on cryptocurrency mining hardware?
Say someone has a wind turbine generator, and more power than they can store/sell back. Does it make sense to mine Bitcoin/Ethereum/a basket of the million shitcoins out there, using that cryptowallet as a virtual battery?
Comment by B — October 26, 2017 @ 8:04 am
My knowledge of crypto currencies is too limited for me to have a valid opinion on the merits or otherwise… my gut is crypto is just another fiat ponzi scheme, and probably as “safe” do dabble in as kiddie porn or islamic terrorist training manuals…
Comment by wimminz — October 26, 2017 @ 11:39 pm