From: jrwalliker@gmail.com   
      
   On 03/10/2025 09:22, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Thu, 2 Oct 2025 11:12:00 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:   
   >   
   >> Well here a pi 500+ at £192 is well above a decent equivalent   
   >> performance refurbished desktop.   
   >   
   > Still, the newer ARM-based machine would consume less electricity, and   
   > take up less space, than the older x86-based one.   
      
   Amazon are currently selling this:   
      
   KASEPE   
   Mini PC 8GB DDR5 256GB M.2 SSD, Mini PC Alder Lake-Ν95 (up to 3.4GHz)   
   Win 11 Pro 4 Cores 4 Threads, Micro PC Support 4K Triple Displays, Mini   
   Desktop PC-WiFi 6 Bluetooth 4.2   
   for £84.00   
      
   I bought one of these last year for an application where I could also   
   have chosen a Pi5.  In the end the Intel version of the software that I   
   needed to run was more mature than the ARM version.  Otherwise there   
   was very little to choose in my case.  I have also used some very   
   nice Bosgame N100 machines which have multiple 2.5Gbit/s ethernet ports.   
   These machines use notebook-style centrifugal fans which are very quiet.   
   One thing that did take a little sorting out was that the BIOS thinks   
   they are notebook PCs with a lid switch but the hardware doesn't have   
   such a switch.  This makes them shut down after a while when a   
   graphical interface is active.  This is annoying when they are   
   being remotely operated in another country.  However, it only needs   
   a 1-line change in a configuration file to fix this.   
      
   For many purposes the Pi5 is an excellent choice - just not   
   everything.   
      
   John   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)