Lenovo Ideacentre 300 as a client?

[wayner]

I just got a Black Friday preview from MS and they will have the Lenovo Ideacentre stick on sale for C$100 (that's about US$75). This is pretty much the same as the Intel stick - it is a full PC on a HDMI stick with an Intel Atom Z3735F CPU, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of flash memory. The CPU is one of Intel's tablet SOCs.

Anyone know if this would work as a client or Placeshifter?

[jchiso]

I suspect that it would work well as a client, provided you could coax smooth playback out of Windows 10. The RAM, storage, graphics, and Atom Z3735F are all well suited to the task. I had an Intel stick last week for about 24 hours, but had to return it after multiple failed attempts to update to Win 10. Obviously, this would not be an issue for the Thinkcentre.

One thing that was objectionable about the Compute Stick was that it would not boot from the power of a standard USB port; whether from a powered hub, the 2.4 amp port of a power bank, or (most critically) the USB port of the one TV on which I tried it. It would boot and seemed to perform well enough using the dedicated power supply, but for my purposes it really hampers the product ...