I found myself in a situation where I needed a windows machine that would be extremely portable and had support to the latest windows OS, but didn’t like the idea of lugging along a laptop or even a windows tablet. Soo, after a bit of researching, I stumbled onto the Pc-on-a-stick thing, and found this Intel Compute Stick from my local retailer for around 160€. A quadcore Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32GB storage, memory card slot for extra storage up to 128GB, runs real windows 10, one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0, wifi and bluetooth onboard.
The idea is that you connect this to any display with. a HDMI input, and breakout your mouse/keyboard/etc for a thin client/workstation use. But it also boots without anything but power connected so could be used more creatively as well!
Anyone using these kind of stick PCs? I am trying to set this one up as a server type machine, for sending sysex, samples etc to my hardware music machines. I already have an iConnectMIDI1+ that should work as MIDI i/o. I also need it for initializing my new Audient iD22 for standalone converter/iOS use. Still sussing out the perfect way to interface with it (dabbling with Duet Display app with an iPad ATM, but its not working properly yet, some conflict with primary/secondary display with the OS?), maybe I need to setup VMWare horizon or some other remote client system for better interfacing.
The CPU power is of course the biggest bottleneck with this one, but it seems powerful enough for simple utilitarian tasks, like something that @void is cooking up (should run something like the Nord Modular editor jus fine!). Gotta try running Reason with it since reason is so well optimized in terms of CPU requirements. If that won’t run I’m sure at least Rebirth will! You can power it with an ext 2A USB battery too.