My retired mother happily uses her iPhone and iPad for the majority of her digital needs, but she uses an old, low-spec Windows 7 laptop for Microsoft Office documents for various committees she sits on, for her music library and digital photos, some web browsing and other tasks that cannot be easily done on a small device.

I have a Mac Mini running through a 42in TV set, and we are interested in the feasibility of using a mini PC hooked up to her 32in TV. Target budget is £300 for PC, keyboard and any adaptors.

For the OS evangelists among your readers, I use a Mac and I may well repurpose her laptop with Linux, but Mum wants Windows. Ant

Mini or micro PCs are terrific at what they do, as long as you don’t expect them to do too much. They are also potential space-savers because they can be attached to the back of any monitor or TV set that has a standard VESA mount. Anyone unfamiliar with the form factor can read an answer from November 2018, What is the point of mini PCs?

However, mini PCs come in at least three overlapping categories. First, there are entry-level models that cost about £100 to £350, and are essentially television set-top boxes. Second, there are desktop replacement minis that are widely used in large businesses for their convenience and space-saving properties. Prices range from £300 to about £1,500.

The third category consists of so-called barebones machines that appeal to computer enthusiasts and other people who want to build their own small-format systems. These could be set-top boxes or desktop replacements depending on the parts used. However, they don’t appeal to home users who want an off-the-shelf set-top box for media streaming, and they don’t appeal to businesses, which buy standardised mini PCs in volume from HP, Lenovo and Dell.

Practical problems

Your question is about the feasibility of using a (roughly) £250 mini PC hooked up to a 32in TV for Microsoft Office and some other uses, such as managing music and photo libraries. There are a couple of reasons why I don’t think it’s a good idea.

The main problem is that it’s not practical to use programs such as Word and Excel at typical TV viewing distances, especially not with such a small TV set. In the old days, interface designers distinguished between “the 3ft experience” of using a computer monitor and “the 10ft experience” of using a TV set. They needed radically different approaches, and different-sized icons and text.

Even if we assume the TV set can display small text sharply enough, your mum will need to be around 3ft/1 metre from the screen to make it usable. Based on my long experience of watching TV in normal-sized living rooms, I’ll be surprised if this is practical. However, you can easily check this by plugging mum’s current Windows laptop into her TV set.

The other problem is your budget. There are plenty of very cheap mini PCs, but their specifications generally include an old and slow Intel Atom processor, 2GB or 4GB of memory, and 32GB of eMMC chip storage, which is pretty much on a par with an SD card. Amazingly enough, machines like this will run Microsoft Office with home-sized documents, but they are underpowered for what your mother needs.

Worse, any PC with limited storage – 32GB or 64GB – may run into problems updating Windows 10 twice a year, even though it should be able to handle upgrades by using, say, an external hard drive as temporary storage space. (Presumably your mum already has one for backup purposes. If not, install some kind of backup solution as soon as possible.)

Unless your mum’s music and photo libraries are very small, even 128GB may not be enough. Fortunately, you can solve this problem by buying something that has an SD card slot. Put all your mum’s music, photos and documents onto a 128GB SanDisk Ultra (£16.98) or similar card, put shortcuts to the three directories on the Windows desktop, and reserve the main eMMC or SSD drive for the operating system and applications.

Mini PC picks

You can still buy a reasonable mini PC on your budget. I’d usually suggest a Beelink J45 with a quad-core Pentium Silver J4205 processor, 8GB of memory, a 128GB SSD and Windows 10 Home for £241.90. Including any cables, you’d probably be under budget with a Logitech K400 wireless keyboard currently going for almost half price (£17.99) on Amazon.co.uk. I’m suggesting the K400 keyboard because it has a touchpad, whereas the Logitech MK270 (£17) is a standard keyboard plus a mouse.

Unusually, the same Beelink page at Amazon has some better deals. For example, the same Beelink J45 with a 256GB SSD is currently being discounted by £75 to £193.80, so the version with 256GB of storage is much cheaper than the one with 128GB.

Alternatively, you could get a Beelink L55 with a faster, but rather old, Core i3-5005U processor for £218.84. How this differs from the Beelink U55 that has the same specification for £299.90 remains a mystery.

Suppliers rarely sell their higher-spec PCs for less than their lower-spec versions, so either I’m missing something or the apparent anomalies won’t last very long.

Add a monitor?

Since the small TV set is likely to be a problem, you could either spend quite a lot of money on a bigger TV set or a smaller amount on a computer monitor. For example, you could get your mother a 21.5in Dell SE2219H IPS screen for £99.95, or the same-sized HP 22w for £79.99. Either of these 1920 x 1080-pixel Full HD screens would work with a mini PC and provide much more comfortable viewing for a pair of ageing eyes.

If you buy a mini PC for closer to £200 then you could still come in around your budget price with either of these monitors, as long as your mother can find space for the extra screen.

This is well worth considering because mum will get a better screen and keyboard, and an all-round better system by combining a mini PC and a monitor than she would get with a cheap laptop or all-in-one.

The package price also compares well against the cost of an iPad or an iPhone, not to mention a Mac Mini (£799 with only 128GB of storage).

Laptop options

Under the circumstances, you may want to take the easy way out and replace mum’s old laptop with a new laptop. It’s some time since I looked at cheap laptops, and my most recent answer covered laptops costing up to £500. You can still buy “real” laptops for less, but below £300, the experience gets progressively worse.

Yes, you can live with a laptop that has limited screen resolution (1366 x 768 pixels), a slow Intel Pentium or Celeron processor, only 4GB of memory and a traditional hard drive, but you can do dramatically better for not a lot more money.

For example, the 15.6in Asus X540 is an entry-level laptop with that sort of spec (Pentium Silver N5000, 4GB, 1TB HDD) and good value at £249.99 from Argos. But you could get a similar machine such as the HP 255 G7 with a Full HD screen, slightly faster AMD Ryzen 3 2200U with Vega 3 graphics, 8GB of memory (expandable) and a 256GB SSD for £329.98 from eBuyer.

Indeed, for preference, go for the version of the HP laptop with an Intel Core i5-8265U processor for £399.99, or the smarter looking Lenovo V155-15API with a Ryzen 5 3500U and Vega 8 graphics for the same price.

Low specs are a false economy. Today, 8GB of RAM costs about £30, so fitting 4GB instead of 8GB only saves $20 at retail prices. It must save even less at the wholesale prices that HP and Lenovo pay when they are buying more than 1m memory modules a week. At current prices, it’s crazy to buy PCs with only 4GB, unless you plan to add more memory instantly.

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