You can get a refurbished corporate PC for pretty cheap nowadays
You know these computers if you work in any company that also has cubicles or if you have gone to a doctor’s office and the computer is this tiny thing strapped to the back of the monitor. They can be this tiny black square that looks like an external hard drive from 2008 and if you are bored watching a documentary about extremism or murder, you can purchase them from Amazon (or eBay, or probably anywhere else).
My plan was to make a little Minecraft machine for the kiddo, small enough to fit where I usually hook up my laptop. Lucky for me, Minecraft doesn’t need the greatest specs (no ray tracing mods for me) so I could look at alternative options beyond some prebuilt gaming rig. After EXTENSIVE research (falling asleep on the couch with my phone on my chest), the Amazon renewed store came up and I found it, HP ProDesk 600 – intel i5-7500T, 16G DDR4, 1T SSD, and Windows Pro for $160 (I had some refund money so it felt like even less). A quick clean install of Windows and I was good to go!
But the project comes from making things harder than they need to be, so I continued to search for a deal, a small form computer under $100 that has enough horsepower to play with. Why? Because I know I can. Hours of phone research, Bluey episodes and bathroom trips were spent researching specs, by the processor, memory, online retailer, brand, and most importantly by price. It was an ever-evolving comparison with every factor seemingly the most important and the final decision was made in the only possible way, going online late after too many drinks. Three days later the package arrives. Lenovo Tiny Desktop, Windows 10 Pro, i5 6th gen, smaller RAM, and smaller SSD but enough to keep it cheap.
Now I have my tool, what to do with it? I already have a Plex server running but I do have excellent home internet, why not set up a remote desktop build? Windows 10 Pro has it built in already so setting up the connection takes no time and now I can fiddle with my new machine anywhere. Even write a blog post remotely. But what to do next?
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