HP Stream Mini: A Cute, Cheap Windows Desktop

HP Stream Mini: A Cute, Cheap Windows Desktop

The HP Stream is the bargain laptop to beat. But what if you want a desktop instead? Take a peek at the new HP Stream Mini. At just over 5cm tall, 730g light and a mere $US180 out of your wallet, this tiny pastel blue nettop packs a surprising amount of value into the case.

Sure, you’ll only get a 1.4GHz Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of solid state storage and last-gen 802.11n Wi-Fi, but there are plenty of ports on tap. With a computer this cheap, you’ll probably be plugging it right into a TV, and twin DisplayPort and HDMI sockets will make damn sure you can do that. Four USB 3.0 ports (two front, two back), an SD card slot, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 4.0 a 3.5mm headset jack round out the connectivity suite, and the machine comes with a USB keyboard and mouse, a $US25 Windows Store giftcard, and a two-year, 200GB subscription to OneDrive.

Yep, not a particularly powerful computer, but at least that 1.4GHz processor is of the Haswell variety, actually making it a bit more powerful than the 2.16GHz Bay Trail chip in the Stream laptop. More importantly, it’s cheap.

But if you want to pay more, you can: HP will also sell a Pavilion Mini desktop that looks identical except for a white paintjob, a wireless keyboard, a starting price of $US320 for a 1.7GHz processor, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive… plus the ability to expand those specs to a Core i3, 1TB of storage, and 8GB of RAM. Both PCs will go on sale on January 14 from HP’s website, and on February 8 at retail stores.


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