I have finally found a macmini type PC. I am buying it for my mum who will use it for the internet, a little word processing. I might stick autoCAD and sketchup on it but I doubt it.

First are they any good as I thought Intel Atom was for netbooks? I think the first one has a better spec, but how much better.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASRock-ION-3D-152D-Atom-D525-2GB-320GB-DVDRW-NVIDIA-ION-GT218-MCE-Remote-PC-/140696453012?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item20c2297f94#ht_1038wt_1197

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/130644242788?_trksid=p5197.c0.m619#ht_500wt_1212

Kind regards a confused tails

Why do you not just buy a Mac Mini?

Intel Atom is a Netbook processor. They’re very low powered and useful for not much at all.

The Mac mini comes with a core i5 processor in it. There is no contest!

Intel Atom is a Netbook processor. They’re very low powered and useful for not much at all

I would disagree with this. They are fine for word processing, surfing, emailing and that sort of thing. I’ve got a machine with a single core Atom 1.4GHz and 2Gb ram and I can run eclipse on it (memory hungry Java development environment). They are quite useable. It was bought a few years ago – the current crop of Atoms and even more so the AMD E-400/450 things are much more powerful than the one I have.

I’ve got a dual-core atom in a desktop and its terrible. For the most basic of wordprocessing tasks its just about acceptable, but start browsing websites and it starts to struggle. Video is fine though, as its handled by the GPU bit. Mines mainly used as a media centre.

Something like this would be better IMO
http://www.ebuyer.com/337174-zoostorm-desktop-pc-7873-1051

I browse a lot on my Vaio P series with the old Atom. No issues. It’s not as lickety split as a snazzy PC but the limit with browsing is still the internet commection.

I would recommend these:

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=acer+revo

Over that, I have this one:

http://www.ebuyer.com/279899-acer-aspire-revo-r3700-nettop-pt-semec-037

Next to my TV for running XBMC, connecting to a NAS, streaming etc. etc. It’s fine for browsing, watching iPlayer, emailing. It is not up to video processing, software development etc.

The macmini is double the price is my main argument, unfortunately the ASrock with i3/i5/i7 are very expensive. There are very few small form factor PC’s like the macmini, Dell used to do one.

I’m guessing OP is after form factor, rather than an actual Mac Mini, and from the given specs doesn’t need anything that powerful – hence no need to pay Apple prices. For browsing and word processing an Atom will be fine – I’ve used one of those and didn’t notice any issues even doing much more processor intensive stuff.

Look around on fleabay and you can find Mac Mini’s for reasonable amounts:
http://item.mobileweb.ebay.co.uk/viewitem?itemId=270906367400&index=8&nav=SEARCH&nid=04442027526
I found three for less than £250. Easy to put more RAM in, and you can take the optical drive out and drop a second drive into the bay, then get a USB external optical drive. Mine was new last August, one of the last of the old models with an optical that the shop had, and they put an extra 2Gb RAM in, so it’s got 4Gb RAM, and 1.1Tb of storage internally. Great little machine, I love it.

I had not thought of getting the old version, they generally go for £310+ hmmmm!

Also when my mother went on my MBP, her first remark was where is the red cross. As on windows it is in the right hand corner, that is what we are dealing with here!

I imagine a core2duo would out perform a atom chip, but those macmini’s are getting a bit old now.

an atom with 2gb+ ram should be fine. I know lots of peeps who have bought a net book and upgraded the ram to use it as their main device.

limit what is running (crap ware) and it’ll keep going. I have a 3 year old net book running Linux mint that flies. mint 9 is very user friendly and less of a shock to the system than Mac os if coming from windose.