Mini PC as business desktop/POS?

F

FoXtroT

Expert Member
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
4,270
Reaction score
81
I've been given the job at my current company (in retail) to look into replacing/phasing in new PCs for our admin staff and for use as POS devices and I have been wondering whether it might be prudent to give mini-PCs a serious consideration.

Currently most of the PCs are combinations of old, refurbished HPs and Dells with processors ranging from Pentiums, to Celerons to Core 2 Duos. In the offices they are mainly used for Word,Excel,email and some web based applications while for the POC they use some custom (but lightweight) POS software.

The current way of doing things is to keep purchasing refurbished PCs but I think a mini-PC like the Intel NUCs might be a clever way to go in terms of performance,size and longevity. Or should I perhaps look at all-in-ones?

Do you guys think a mini-pc is an effective desktop replacement in this regard?

Anyone have any experience using them as their main PC in this sort of environment?

Thanks in advance for your help.
 
At a previous job we used these as a registration terminal (added 2 GB of RAM for a total of 4) at the front desk. We had them hooked up to 1080 screens with a Keyboard and mouse. They were more than sufficient for the job.

I also had 8 of them in my training center but they were moved around and abused every time someone "quickly" needed a PC to test something. In the two years I worked there I did not replace a single one.

Basic Office, Emails etc they will handle. If your POC system runs off old Celerons you will not have a problem. As long as you wont be doing much outside of office admin I'm sure you'll be happy.
 
IMO NUC is overpriced. Compact, but overpriced.
Alternative, depending on needs, is to go heavy on the server and run terminal services with small diskless linux boxes.
 
Trokmeteenwiel said:
IMO NUC is overpriced. Compact, but overpriced.
Alternative, depending on needs, is to go heavy on the server and run terminal services with small diskless linux boxes.
Click to expand...

The pricing on the those Mecer Venus machine were very good if memory serves. Around R4k mark. Dunno what the $ crash has done to them.

If you want to go heavy on the server side you will need to do a cost analysis and see how many user "terminals" you will need in order to justify the price of a more powerful server vs small cheap desktops. You also need to consider POC portability with regards to the linux environment and its requirements (blah blah blah). As much as I wish people would adopt linux in a work environment unfortunately my experience is that people wont go for it. You will need to send every one using these terminals for training because honestly POS staff are not power users and generally they follow monkey see monkey do principals (broad generalising, sorry) so teaching them to use a new document processor will take time (read money) and from my understanding they have not been willing to spend lots of money to start with.
 
Werfetter said:
The pricing on the those Mecer Venus machine were very good if memory serves. Around R4k mark. Dunno what the $ crash has done to them.

If you want to go heavy on the server side you will need to do a cost analysis and see how many user "terminals" you will need in order to justify the price of a more powerful server vs small cheap desktops. You also need to consider POC portability with regards to the linux environment and its requirements (blah blah blah). As much as I wish people would adopt linux in a work environment unfortunately my experience is that people wont go for it. You will need to send every one using these terminals for training because honestly POS staff are not power users and generally they follow monkey see monkey do principals (broad generalising, sorry) so teaching them to use a new document processor will take time (read money) and from my understanding they have not been willing to spend lots of money to start with.
Click to expand...

They'll be running windows, not Linux - the only piece of Linux is the boot up to RDP. Yes to the cost analysis, but as a Sysadmin, it's a breeze.
 
Why not look at a thin client setup?

I had 2 different clients with between 10-16 users each, one a travel agency. All they did were Office stuff (Word/Excel/Outlook/www) and Pastel.

I've setup a hybrid network for them. Started with a firewall, one server (AD, File, DNS, DHCP), and then the bosses had notebooks. For the office bound guys I supplied one serious Dell Workstation, installed the OS, joined to the domain, installed Office and a accounting package client on this workstation, then installed this NComputing software.

On the client side you install this little box that connect to the network, and give you a VGA, couple of USB ports, and you mount it on the back of a monitor. Each client open a session on the big workstation, has his or her own instance (because of username), and it just worked.

You only have one PC to maintain (virus and software wise), you can set it up very strict, so the users can only change their background, open the allowed programs, and print. (you can connect printers locally as well. I used big network MFCs, but a desktop/slip printer works well. Very stable setup... I were really sceptical at first, but if you have guys doing the basics day in and out, I wouldn't go the route of having so many small machine out there which you need to maintain.

I've used this one,
https://www.ncomputing.com/en/products/lseries/overview

but there are other products as well, maybe something that suite your needs better.

I have to agree with Trokmeteenwiel, NUCs are overpriced, I'll rather go for a PC stick. Or all-in-one.
 
Trokmeteenwiel said:
They'll be running windows, not Linux - the only piece of Linux is the boot up to RDP. Yes to the cost analysis, but as a Sysadmin, it's a breeze.
Click to expand...

My bad, yes admin is easy enough.

So FoxTrot you feel like pitching a Thin Client based architecture to you management?
 
I'm guessing the cost is prohibitive if they've been buying second hand machines thus far....
 
Werfetter said:
My bad, yes admin is easy enough.

So FoxTrot you feel like pitching a Thin Client based architecture to you management?
Click to expand...

Might be a bit of a hard sell seeing as I've never used VMs or the like before so won't know how to explain its business use and is that really useful for a POS solution with stores distributed across the country, some with slower internet connections?

Anyway, I think it would be a very hard sell to spend a lot more on a decent server set-up. We've just had to spend a fair amount on redoing a lot of the physical network infrastructure and that expense wasn't that well received. In any case this is more of me going above and beyond in seeing possible viable alternative to our current practices since I saw how the current PCs were struggling with even the most basic of tasks and thought the idea of replacing 8 year old PCs with 3 year old ones was silly.

This isn't to say that cost is a problem (many of the staff at office level have been given pretty decent laptops), it's just explaining something as foreign as VMs to them would be tough. There is probably only one computer literate person in the company apart from me.

Thanks for the suggestions though I will give them a though and pass them on to our IT people to see what they think of it. Also I did look at the Intel NUC and you are right, it is pricey for what you get but did see the Lenovo M73 tiny; any seen pricing on them?
 
FoXtroT said:
Thanks for the suggestions though I will give them a though and pass them on to our IT people to see what they think of it. Also I did look at the Intel NUC and you are right, it is pricey for what you get but did see the Lenovo M73 tiny; any seen pricing on them?
Click to expand...

They are priced worse than the NUCs. Around R9k per machine.

Are you not interested in looking at the Mecer? You get them from Mustek.
 
Werfetter said:
They are priced worse than the NUCs. Around R9k per machine.

Are you not interested in looking at the Mecer? You get them from Mustek.
Click to expand...

No I will definitely have a look, just keeping my options open.

Thanks :)
 
Well if you are looking at all the options the Alienware Alpha is an option too at around R10k :p :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X