All-In-One PC Choice

jsmith9

My personal choice would be a 17-inch laptop over an AOI

stuart07970

Buy a second hand Mac mini (or maybe a ChromeTop? I got one fir £96!!! or a NUC) and hide it under the desk, and use a wireless keyboard and mouse.
A clean set up is only as ‘clean’ as you can make the cabling!

I would also argue that the only best selling ‘all in one’ is the iMac

Second hand Intel macs are going to drop in value over the next few months as Apple roll out the faster M1 processor

TCA

Thanks to everyone above for the replies and suggestions.

I can see where you're all coming from regarding these AIO machines. Regarding portability, the main motivation behind that requirement would be the ability to easily move the pc from an office to another room for viewing films and TV. That's also where the desire for a decent sized screen comes in. I'm currently using an ancient 17" Dell monitor but feel something that size would be too small for a bigger room, so probably the notion of having to buy a separate monitor has led me to looking at AIOs, which at least seemed decent value overall for the specs (albeit with the drawbacks you've all mentioned). A cost saving of course won't exist if something goes wrong further down the road and I can't repair it.

I'll start looking at some of the options given above, including NUCs which I'd never heard of before.    
 

interstellaflyer

J_B said:

All in One's are part of today's disposable age, which isn't very MSE

Desktops are much more easily 'upgradeable'

Do you have a reason for wanting an AOI?

Sort of true but they are upgradable enough for a normal user, I've just upgraded 2 HP AIO machines at work to more RAM and SSD one of them even had an LGA1155 socket rather than the usual processor soldered to motherboard so a processor upgrade from the Pentium G640 up to (according to HP) an i3 3240 could be done.

TCA

From the processor comparison link in my initial post, it appears the RAM of the i5-10400T and AMD Ryzen 5 4500U processors can be upgraded from the 8GB they come with, to  128GB (DDR4-2666) and 64GB (DDR4-3200, LPDDR4-4266) respectively.

I'm guessing however this wouldn't be an easy job for an amateur in respect of an AIO machine.

Both AIO machines in my OP have two M.2 expansion slots (1 SSD, 1 WLAN) but I don't foresee a need for increased storage in my case.      

interstellaflyer

TCA said:

I'm guessing however this wouldn't be an easy job for an amateur in respect of an AIO machine.

      

I'm not sure about new machines, but the older ones come apart very easily

fred246

You normally end up upgrading the motherboard, CPU and RAM together. For a basic internet and office PC it normally costs around £200. You can do this if your PC takes mini ITX boards. Normally mini ITX boards cost a bit more than normal desktop ATX boards. That's the most expensive upgrade. You just keep all the other parts until they fail so you never have another £500 bill ever.

jsmith9

If you upgrade the motherboard etc as above can you activate your W10 or do you need a new licence?

fred246

It depends on the Windows version. I have been known to get keys from reputable sellers on eBay. The other option is to go Linux.

fred246

Windows 10 now works without a key but leaves a watermark. This normally starts a big discussion on Windows licensing.