On Wednesday, January 13, 2021 07:33:14 PM Dan Ritter wrote: > My wife's "desktop" is an ASRock DeskMini A300W -- a box of > about that size, in which I placed a 3400G, 32GB RAM and an NVMe > SSD. She drives a 4K monitor from the HDMI port. Debian Buster. > > It has a VGA port. > > The new version is the X300W, which costs about $30 more, takes > a newer revision of AMD APU, and still has a VGA port available. > > My two criticisms: it's a bit of a pain to put together the > first time if you have giant fingers, which I do. It would be > nice to have more USB ports, though this can be solved with a > USB3 hub.
Dan (and all), Thanks again for the pointer, but I'll add a 3rd criticism and a "workaround": Aside: I am still looking, and am considering some of the ASRocks and also some Lenovo (and maybe other) refurbished models. Aside: I usually don't buy (or even consider) things like refurbished disk drives (what do they do, repolish the disk surfaces? ;-) (I'm being facetious)) or devices like laptops that include disk drives -- partly because of what I read once about adding memory and replacing the disk drive in a recent HP laptop (in the old days, it was easy) -- early in the instructions it talked about the need to remove something like 56 screws -- but after (later) reading a little more , it really depended on how much you wanted to replace. On a mini-PC I'm confident about my ability to replace a disk drive without too much trouble. The criticism: The ASRock web pages (well, almost all of them), with the dark images on a black background were just about impossible for me to see / read (I got a headache). (Even my "trick" of selecting / highlighting the page wasn't much help.) (Well, the page for one model, I forget which, was readable with a white background.) And no prices. (I realized later that might make some sense as apparently they don't sell direct, but still, it would be helpful to see an MSRP ;-) The workaround: Eventually I found that Newegg was an "e-tailer" for ASRock, so I went to the Newegg site and am looking at the offerings there. (I don't think they sell all models (I didn't notice any of the "Bee"s, iirc.) But the pages are readable and they do show prices.
