the joys of an intel NUC

enfield_freddy

decided to treat myself to a new media player ,I own a "sum micro 4" which is ok , but wanted to get access to a few new films online.
bought the later "cyclone x4" android "thingy" , not well made , very buggy no onboard RTC , so defaults back to the time in china and a chinease keyboard every time power is removed.


the onboard XBMC could not be updated via google store (not installed , please buy a new copy) and the default android apps (for a media player) were worrying , google maps , messaging, phone ???? , and the best yet google navigation !!!!!! (on a home media player) , back to SCAN first thing this morning , now sporting a Intel "nuc" , just the basic 2820 model , that now has 5the 2830 CPU fitted ,


OK , first job, go into the bios , and set things up , f2 does this ,,,, or not!


even after a reflash of the latest bios , you can only get into the bios , by buying a HDMI to vga adaptor and using your computer monitor?????


bit silly of Intel not to incorporate tis simple thing in the bios


OenElec installed quickly and runs smoothly , however I have now installed win 8.1 and XBMC , with it set to autostart


happy days

spannerzone

They're great aren't they! - I got a similar Gigabyte Brix with an SSD drive and it's a perfect little media PC sitting under the TV and it's about 4"x4"x1" in size and is able to play HD video and stream my audio collection to other devices using Plex....running Win7

enfield_freddy

yup , still playing , umm it would not accept win 7 ,, motherboard not ACHI compliant? , although this is set in the bios

tavernman

enfield_freddy wrote: »

yup , still playing , umm it would not accept win 7 ,, motherboard not ACHI compliant? , although this is set in the bios

I assume you meant AHCI , but is it an efi bios, I haven't got one to play with at the moment but is there not an option to use "legacy" so that AHCI works , mayhap this is the problem , a quick google found this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14518315/does-current-efi-bios-natively-support-ahci , I know from using Linux some AHCI bits get confused with uefi bioses

enfield_freddy

a setting in the bios (via a computer monitor) allows you to set the type of OS , between win 7 and win 8 ,


I want to run a OS as a shell (emergency PC) but not have it intrusive , having tried win 7 and win 8 on a spare drive on my main machine , I think 7 would be better

spannerzone

One thing that tripped me up, I loaded Win7 and all was good except video playback was jerky...well not jerky but image tearing on horizontal pan shots, turned out that in my haste to make the PC run as efficiently as possible, I had turned off all the graphic enhancements including Aero - it seems that video playback is affected if Aero is off (hardware acceleration is disabled), so once reactivated the HD video playback was good again. Recently tinkered with wake on LaN/magic packets, I can put the PC to sleep mode and if another PC needs to access it for music it wakes up then later goes to sleep if out of use, even works if remotely accessing Plex media or Windows RDC.

fwor

By coincidence I'm just about to buy one for my sister as her main PC but not quite sure if it will be up to the job?

I'm thinking of going for the slightly taller D34010 - the idea being that I can put a 30GB mSATA SSD in for the OS and a 500GB conventional HDD for bulk media storage.

But it would be running Linux Mint - anyone had any problems with Linux on these???

enfield_freddy

are you just using it for media (xbmc) or do you need a OS installed?


if xbmc only , then open elec installs on a 20 meg hard drive ,joke innit! and runs good ,


inmy case all the media is held on a dlink nas drive , with xbmc , I get all my own media , plus the "tvaddons" , icefilms ,yify etc etc ,

fwor

enfield_freddy wrote: »

open elec installs on a 20 meg hard drive,

Not seen that before - that's incredibly small!

She needs a full desktop, so I would probably just go with Mint plus a MythTV frontend (and a multi-tuner backend somewhere else in the house).

enfield_freddy

yes openelec creates a 20 meg partition for itself

enfield_freddy

well , this morning my home PC gave up the ghost , the usb ports were acting randomly , and the bios was going crazy with bits appearing , and disappearing , tried to burn an image from a win 8.1 iso I had on my NAS drive , almost an hour to burn it using the Microsoft usb/dvd tool or rufus.#


eventually managed to load a cloning cd , and cloned my drive onto the SSD in the NUC , bit of frustration deleting drivers and reinstalling new ones.


result: I am now using the NUC to surf on , its acceptable and seems to do the job , its quiet and only using about 15w of power,


I will save up for an i3/i5 version , then return this one back to the TV duties