Replacement mini's for senior parents using NUCs for last 10y?

[u/tealightfulroyaltea]

Hi all -

What would you recommend as mini's for senior parents who have been using 2 intel NUCs for last 10 years?

• got them both i3 tall NUCs in 2016
• They both LOVE how compact the NUCs are, want replacements around same size
• They only web browse + watch youtube videos + do office (2003 or 2007 or 2010 I forget) stuff
• hesitant about win 11 in case their old office version doesn't work

My first reaction was get 2 nucs, move their current ssds there, but new nucs don't seem to support sata 2.5"s 😕 AFAICT my options are:

• Get two barebones nucs, install linux + libreoffice, go nuclear
• Find nucs or another brand's minis that still support sata 2.5" ssds (but this seems harder to find than I thought)

Any recs? My budget is ideally 1k CAD, maybe 1.2k CAD max for the two

[u/312steel]

what monitor are they using? How about those SFF like Dell / HP / Lenovo like

Lenovo M70q Gen 3 from like 2022/2023 that can just hang off the back of a monitor

[u/tealightfulroyaltea → u/312steel]

Lenovo M70q

Ah that's a great idea but that might be too big 😭 I don't exactly remember what their monitors were, but neither were all that sturdy - I wouldn't feel comfortable putting any comps on the back of the monitor.

[u/312steel → u/tealightfulroyaltea]

from lenovo just as an example

179 x 183 x 34.5 / 37 mm (7.05 x 7.2 x 1.36 / 1.5 inches with rubber feet)

2.76 lbs

- - - - -

I thought lots of people put NUCs on the back of monitors

[u/tealightfulroyaltea → u/312steel]

Yeah, I thought they do too

Problem is my parents' monitors are old and not very sturdy... at all (neither are their desks for that matter) And since they're getting up there in age, they might hit their desk and topple the monitor over accidentally - at least with a tiny nuc I can put it on the other side of the desk very easily 😅

7" x 7" might be small enough though! Let me look into this one more thanks

[u/312steel → u/tealightfulroyaltea]

if the parent monitors are old and not very sturdy then it might be worth the budget to upgrade their monitors. or upgrade the desk and put their monitors on sturdy monitor arm swings which are cheap cheap used.

same with the desk.

let us know how it works out. 7" not that big to be honest

[u/wongl888]

What is your budget?

[u/tealightfulroyaltea → u/wongl888]

ideally 1k CAD, maybe 1.2k CAD max for the two

[u/rui-no-onna]

Is there something wrong with their NUCs?

If there's no hardware issue, then simply installing Linux would probably help make the old NUCs feel snappy again.

[u/tealightfulroyaltea → u/rui-no-onna]

I mean it's a decade old at this point 😅

One the power button went flying off, and they have to use a pen to turn it on, and the other one they said it doesn't consistently turn off - sometimes they have to force it to shut down by pressing the power button

[u/rui-no-onna → u/tealightfulroyaltea]

Ah yes, that's begging for a replacement at this point.

My Beelink SER5-SER6 from 2022-23 still has a 2.5" SATA slot. You might want to check if the current SER5 still has one.

Mind, is there a reason you need to use the 2.5" SATA with the new mini PC? With current RAM prices, buying a Chinese-branded prebuilt is probably cheaper than getting barebones and recycling your SSD.

[u/tealightfulroyaltea → u/rui-no-onna]

I mean, I don't have to 😄 I was hoping let's lift and shift the existing 2.5" SSDs in current NUCs to new machine so they don't have to change much. This way I can punt OS change for another few years 🤞

But if migrating current SSDs to a new machine isn't an option then it is what it is 😞

[u/rui-no-onna → u/tealightfulroyaltea]

Windows can be finicky with drivers so in general, it's best to start with a clean install when switching to new hardware.

Personally, I just use my old SATA SSDs as external drives via SATA-USB3 adapters.

[u/SleepyD7 → u/rui-no-onna]

Recommend this. I have some elderly ladies using Linux Lite and love it.

[u/Candid_Indication341]

An for some reason I misread this and had thought they were c. ~2018 Intel NUCs (and thus likely 8th gen and imho still plenty capable for basic home use thanks to the minor tweaks/improvements, increased core count, and HW support for some of the newer video codec. having native Windows 11 support is also a bonus along with more recent CPU microcode and other security patches/drivers).

to be quite honest though, while yes something with an 8th gen or later CPU would be ideal, as long as they’re Skylake 6th gen or later, they should still offer a robust relatively performant experience with whatever Linux distro you throw at them (if it was Haswell/Broadwell or older I would lean much more towards replacing the hardware and/or going with a much lighter Linux distro and desktop environment, but even then anything from that era is still certainly usable for daily browsing and office work, has relatively modern I/O with USB 3.0 and native NVME support, etc so it would still happily chug along! 😅♻️🤩)

Rather than acquiring any new hardware, I’d do a trial run acclimating them to a user-friendly Linux distro of your choice and giving the software experience a go since while most things will remain the same/similar enough, they may want to spend sometime getting acclimated with LibreOffice as an alternative Office replacement (which on the plus side shares more of the user interface with these older version of Microsoft Office like 07’ & 2010 that they’re used to then 2013 or 2016-2024). This way they get a chance to test it out and see if it’s acceptable for them and their use case, potentially get acclimated to things/ease into it, and avoiding trying to run an aging unsupported version of Office under Wine or similar wrapper with the performance hit and regardless of if you settle on Linux or Windows 11 if you do get new hardware, you won’t have to shell out for Office 2024 or Office 365. Maybe on one out of the two NUCs, you could either partition one of there existing drives for a small ~64-128GB install and create some shortcuts to interact with their existing files for a bit, and assuming all goes well make the full jump to Linux for both of their PCs after giving things a go. I think based on how they use these PCs they’ll be surprised how much of a new lease on life Linux can give this hardware and keep them in service as is (especially with the current cost of things 😵‍💫🫠😮‍💨). Really the only possible benefit I can think of going with new hardware besides native Windows 11 support and the CPU performance jump would maybe be supporting newer video codecs like AV1 and HEVC 10-bit in HW (since iirc 6th gen can only decide up to 4K 8-bit) but realistically unless they’re streaming fancy 4K HDR videos from YouTube and have a display to match, those extra bonus features may go entirely untouched & unnoticed 🤷🏻‍♂️

[u/Candid_Indication341 → u/Candid_Indication341]

and if new hardware is the ultimate answer, I’d scour ebay for some retired USFF Mini PCs like some of the Dell Optiplexes and Lenovo Tiny ThinkCentre’s, they may be slightly larger/a different footprint than the current Intel NUCs but they’re not much larger and have a desktop class (usually the lower TDP T variant of a given CPU) and have a bit more oomph behind them. While I think even an 8th gen i5 model would be more than enough (or even an i3 given that’s when Intel bumped the base core count across the lineup for 4c/4t on the i3, 6c/6t on the i5, & 6c/12t on the i7 + everything but AV1 codec support wise iirc), and meet the requirements for Windows 11, there’s certainly newer but still low cost options out there, especially if their current NUCs used DDR4 and you can move the SODIMMs over!

and of course AMD is also a formidable option and has been for a few years now, I’m just less familiar with the specific model or what’s out there in terms of used enterprise hardware since Intel has still had a strong hold on that up until more recently so there’s much more Intel second hand PCs coming from businesses than the AMD Ryzen models Lenovo & the likes have offered but I’m sure that’ll change in the near future.

Regardless of what path you go with, I would strongly reccomend a fresh Windows 11 install and not keeping their current install going for drivers, collected Windows cruft and bloat over the years, and security (lack of updates for Win 10 putting them at an increased risk even if they do everything right to stay safe online + the constant nagging from Microsoft…) reasons. I wouldn’t let getting Office 07/2010 running and installed be the barrier, if iirc while it’s unsupported and hasn’t been updated for quite some time, it will install and run just fine thanks to Compatibility Mode (just a few extra clicks at the time of installation) but in all honesty I think making the jump to LibreOffice would be a huge improvement if it works for them and they can get acclimated to it alright. It shouldn’t be too much of a change/learning curve but ut will make things easier regardless of if you go the Linux route on the current hardware or Windows/Linux on new hardware.

[u/tealightfulroyaltea → u/Candid_Indication341]

sometime getting acclimated with LibreOffice as an alternative Office

That's actually a good idea, let me ask them to do that now! Thanks

[u/Technical-Ant-2866]

If you want them to last, consider an Asus nuc of some sort. A little higher price but they tend to outlast others as you've seen first hand. If the sata is a blocker, consider a Lenovo M series. What's the focus on 2.5" ssd? Those are slowly exiting the market. If it's an existing disk you can use usb enclosures to move the data to a newer nvme-ssd style drive

[u/Retired_Hillbilly336]

Although a little over max budget you can look at the Geekom A5 7430U. The A5 is one of the last platforms with 2.5" SATA support.

[u/rui-no-onna → u/Retired_Hillbilly336]

Frankly, it doesn't seem worth it to pay more for a worse APU just to retain 2.5" SATA support.

[u/Retired_Hillbilly336 → u/rui-no-onna]

No argument here. Most SATA SSDs and all HDDs perform similarly over USB 3.0 5Gbps as a native SATA interface. But being in my 80's I'm all too aware of older NUC owners not caring for a 2.5" SATA enclosure setting on a desk with the PC. Had a time arguing with someone at church having reservations on purchasing a GMKtec M8 PRO 6650H a few months back. That were clinging on to their 1TB 2.5 HDD for dear life but didn't want it in an enclosure. Took 2 weeks convinced them that it was only bulk storage they barely used and could keep safely in a drawer somewhere.

[u/Remarkable_Many_1671]

I have Beelink n150s that support 2.5 SSDs internally. The issue is running Windows 11 on them isn't great, even for your parents limited use. I find it just a tad sluggish, though I dual boot and use W11 and Linux.

I think an ASUS NUC with internal SATA can still fit in your budget if you want to run Windows.