Review on HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Tiny Computer Micro Tower PC - Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD, WiFi - Windows 10 Pro (Renewed) by Charles Phillips

I am a professional computer engineer. I bought this product as a home server and number processor. First, I replaced Windows with Linux. I had no trouble logging into Windows, and on Linux, I found the hardware support in the latest version of Ubuntu to be excellent. The wireless adapter wasn't working properly so I used my own but it would probably work fine on Windows. It's a fairly old processor, but its performance is still good enough for interactive desktop use. The biggest performance hit is a spinning hard drive, a major cause of latency when launching applications. However, I wouldn't recommend upgrading the storage at this price point. The old DDR3 memory is balanced with the old processor, so if you don't care about the loading time, I would give up the already quite acceptable performance. There is no point in investing even $50 in a machine that uses a 2013 processor. In my case I wanted to upgrade from Raspberry Pi to something more powerful. Even a mid-range 2013 processor is a huge step up from the ultra-low-power platform I'm used to. For my application, my tests show I'm getting nearly eight times the performance of a Raspberry Pi 4. Great. I also use this device for LAN movie streaming and it can finally keep up with video conversion. However, I'm not criticizing the Raspberry Pi, which uses far less power and is less than half the price. When you receive the device, be sure to remove the extra plug from the end of the power cord. I thought I was wrong until I realized I could delete this piece. I would not recommend this device for serious gaming. This will be sufficient for light games like Roblox or Minecraft, but the lack of a graphics card means that a gamer will not want more. Don't crank up the quality settings and don't expect a smooth gaming experience. I would totally buy this for my little brother for example, but I wouldn't dream of playing it myself. I run the device 24 hours a day with 100% CPU utilization and fan noise is minimal with a very faint hum when listening from a few feet away. I would recommend this device to anyone looking for a home server and users with modest computing needs. It would be a perfectly usable machine for Facebook, web surfing and word processing. It's not slow and it's not fast. That's convenient. It works. It's pretty cheap. You pay what the processor alone cost 5 years ago and get the rest of the machine for free, plus a keyboard and mouse. I will donate this accessory to Goodwill.