MeLE PCG02 Mini PC Stick N100 (up to 3.4GHz) 8GB LPDDR4x 256GB eMMC, Win11Pro Fanless Micro Desktop Computer, Support HDMI + USB-C 4K Dual Display, 2.4G/5GHz WiFi BT5.1 GbE, for IoT, Digital Signage

This thing is so cool. I used it to make a digital poster frame out of a television, and it has not disappointed me. Compact PCs are an insanely useful product as long as you understand their limitations. Now, while the price point of this item isn't as much as it used to be when I was much more daring in my PC pursuits, people still stop to consider whether it's worth it much of the time, and I'm here to say that my experience has vindicated the price. It's a fully-functional Windows 11 PC, and with the addition of keyboard, mouse, and screen it slaps on light usage. So let's break it down into PC paradigms:Heat level - first thing to mention is that electronics generate heat. This stick PC sits right between the wall and the flush-mounted TV, which also generates some heat. The PC does not generate too much heat, and does not build up heat behind the television.Power - something like this is not meant for high-demand tasks. It's perfect for creating digital signage, casual web browsing, and kiosk functionality. It would also work well for specialized applications and automation.Speed - this PC does not seem to lag at all, as long as we're not asking too much of it. In its current role, all it does is change the poster once a minute. When updates come in, I have it set up to automatically update Windows. When it finishes, it reboots and gets right back to where it needs to be and my posters are back in action.Connections - what we have on this PC is about the minimum amount of ports necessary. One could argue that you could get away with a single USB port by using a hub or unified receiver, but it's nice to have two ports so I don't have to. It's got HDMI for video, a port for the power cable, an ethernet port in case you don't want to go wireless, and a microSD card slot for storage expansion. Given that this model has wifi I don't need the ethernet port but that's my preference.Overall, this product has me encouraged about the future of tiny computers. It's well worth the price and can be put to any (light demand) purpose you can dream up for it.

I don't know if I'd be comfortable leaving this sticking directly out of a horizontal HDMI port (it's a bit on the large size for that without some sort of support), but the PCG02 does make for the most adorable little desktop PC, and at least the N100 variants are powerful enough to handle pretty much anything a casual home user would want to throw at it (i.e. no heavy gaming, but it should be able to handle web browsing without issue).I personally installed Batocera on it for a tiny little gaming machine that can handle up to at least N64 without too much issue (I didn't try anything more demanding than that).Pros:+ A dedicated 12v, 2A USB-C power input that negotiates PD properly, so you can easily power it off of an appropriate power bank or Power Over Ethernet splitter.+ A separate, fully-featured USB-C port that can be used for data, power, or video. The fact that this is a separate port from the power port means you can use a power bank and a pair of AR Glasses at the same time, and this PC is small enough that I would be willing to call this sort of setup pocketable. Alternately, you can use this with a monitor with USB-C video in (that provides passthrough PD power) for a single-cable setup.+ Multiple USB-A inputs so you can have both mouse and keyboard plugged in at once. It feels a little weird to call this out specifically, but after setting up some Raspberry Pi Zeroes, a small computer with multiple full-size USB ports shouldn't be taken for granted.+ Silent.+ Tiny. It's a bit bigger than, say, one of the old Compute Sticks, but it's still smaller than most laptop power bricks by a wide margin.+ Has some mounting holes. These are intended to be used with the included VESA mount, but since they're just standard M3 screw holes you can use them to mount to other things as well.Cons:- A bit pricey, especially at full price. I bought this at $140 with a coupon, but even then you can find similarly-specced mini-PCs for significantly less (though generally larger, louder, and without USB-C power input).- No built-in POE support. This is an exceptionally rare thing for mini-PCs to have, but it's easy to compare this to the Minisforum S100 (since they're both similarly-sized and specced N100 mini-PCs) and POE is the big selling point there.- Not a gaming PC. Probably not going to be a good choice for stuff like video rendering, either.- It gets toasty, since no fan means all the heat dissipates into the case. While I don't think it's likely to actually burn you unless you're abusing the poor thing pretty bad, it gets warm enough to be uncomfortable to touch for more than a couple seconds.- Power brick is 12v only. Don't plug it into anything else or it may fry whatever you connect it to.

Item arrived on time and is a nice little PC. Fair warning. It comes with Windows 11 Home, however it's not activated and cannot be activated. You will need to buy a license. With the 4gig of ram installed, the machine for any purpose other then a web applet application or slide show the machine is just about unusable. It took me 6 hours to install just the latest feature release for Windows 11.Don't expect this to be a video conference Teams or Zoom machine. But it makes a good menu board or info center machine.Once up and running it took my PowerPoint well and displayed a few security cameras which is what I bought it for. I will just need to purchase a license for Windows now.

I occasionally need a Windows machine to run some windows only software, and rather than running a virtual machine, I thought I'd break down and buy an actual Windows machine.I wasn't expecting this to be a super powerful game machine or server and it isn't. It's just a nice little desktop Windows machine. Small, portable, with reasonable performance and enough memory and sold state disk to make it useful. As an example, this PC works well with Zoom, but don't expect anything more than the basic background, or filters. It just lacks the processing power for the fancier effects.This model shipped with Windows 10 Pro, and per the manufactures recommendation, I allowed it to self-update to Windows 11 Pro. All of the questions I had and the information I needed were addressed on the manufactures website.I'm happy with this purchase, it is just what I wanted.