Hey friends, welcome back to Grand Adventure! I'm your host Marc Guido,
and there are varying reasons why you may wish to have a full-featured desktop PC
in yourRV. We're going to share this week not only the reasons why we do,
but the smallest full-featured desktop PC that we could find, so stay tuned!
After we moved out of our home and decided to go into our RV for full-time travel I discovered that
I missed the media servers that I had running on a home theater PC in our sticks-and-bricks
home. I was running Plex for video content as well as music, but then I also had a separate
Subsonic server that I was running for music alone. I think each one of those servers does
things a little bit differently and I prefer each in different circumstances, but be that as it may
I discovered that I really wished that I had them along in the RV. The movie collection
for our entertainment purposes, and the music for just relaxing when we're at camp. And so I
started thinking about different ways that I could implement those two servers in the RV.
Now our home theater PC at our sticks-and-bricks home was a full-size tower PC, and there was no
way that that was going to fit anywhere in a reasonably convenient location in our RV to
be able to run the existing machine that we had. So I started looking for a small form factor PC,
and boy did I find it! This is the MeLE PCG02. It's a full Windows 10 Professional desktop PC
in a stick factor form that's only five inches long, two inches wide and 0.7 inches thick.
The heart and soul of this PCG02 is an Intel i5 Celeron J4125 quad-core processor. Out of
the box this runs at 2.0 GHz and can be clocked at up to 2.7 GHz, although we haven't had the
need to do that ourselves as that will only draw more power. On board you'll find 8 GB of DDR4 RAM
and 256 gigs of solid-state onboard storage, expandable by a microSD card in this slot here
that can accept up to 1 TB cards. It comes pre-loaded with Windows 10 Pro which is eligible
for the free upgrade to Windows 11 when available. It has on this end a Gigabit ethernet port,
plus it has 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi, AC dual band Wi-Fi for network connectivity.
On this side you'll find two USB 3.0 ports, and the output is via HDMI 2.0.
Onboard Intel Graphics 600 is capable of 4k video at a 60 Hz refresh rate.
This does not have a cooling fan, instead cooling is provided by a specially designed heatsink
so it operates 100% absolutely silently and uses less energy while not accumulating dust,
something that's prevalent in an RV environment. It uses a 5V 3A power supply connected by microUSB
cable, and it's capable of Auto-On and Wake-on-LAN via configuration settings in the BIOS.
Now for our monitor, we're using the 43-inch 4K Roku television that we have in the living room of
our RV. For input devices we're using a wireless Bluetooth keyboard and a wireless Bluetooth mouse.
Now this little guy is absolutely perfectly suited for web browsing, checking and sending email,
for streaming video, streaming audio, or even working with Microsoft Office apps
or working remotely on a VPN as we've done with this machine.
It is not designed for high-power gaming, so if you're expecting a high-power gaming machine
this is not your PC, but for the purposes that we're using it for it's absolutely ideal.
Now back to the reasons why we decided to implement this in the RV. As you know most
RV manufacturers are putting in DVD players, and first of all, who wants to watch a video
in 480p standard definition when our all of our televisions are in high definition? That makes
absolutely no sense and it's not a pleasant viewing experience.
It would be nice if they put Blu-ray players in RVs instead of DVDs;
however, that still requires an entire cabinet to store that entire movie collection, whereas
we have everything on a tiny little 8 TB hard drive that's sitting right behind our television.
This is great if the kids want to watch movies, even if you want to keep yourself entertained.
We have access to all of our video in all of our audio anywhere in the RV.
We've got the MeLE PC sitting right here atop the bracket on our TV mount, and just off to
the left of it you can see the 4 TB drive that we have our music collection and some documents on.
Now the stick PC may not fit in the area where the HDMI cables input into your television, as
is the case with us, so we're using the included six-inch extension cable.
Now if I'm going to be forthright I did not have high expectations for this little guy, both due to its tiny
form factor and due to its price. However, it has clearly exceeded our expectations. It outperforms
laptops that cost multiples of what this little guy does, and we have an always-on PC connected
to the back of our television, ready to provide us video content or music for our relaxation,
to allow me to work on VPN from the road, or simply for web browsing or checking email.
What comes in the box is the PC, the six-inch HDMI extension cable, the 3A 5V power supply,
and an owner's manual. It costs $254.99 presently on Amazon and is available with free Prime
shipping. I'll put affiliate links down below in the video description if you would like to
check out this MeLE stick PC for yourself. Understand that it doesn't cost you any more
to shop Amazon through Grand Adventure, but Grand Adventure receives a small commission on each sale
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So coming up next week (matter of fact scheduled for delivery tomorrow) is our new Starlink
Internet kit, and I cannot tell you after two years of waiting how excited we are for this. I am
optimistic that if it arrives on time next week's episode we'll be sharing our first experiences
with high-speed Starlink satellite Internet in our RV, so you do not want to miss next week's
episode! Until then please remember, life is nothing but a Grand Adventure! We'll see you then.