u/bfollowell

My wife and I are about to break ground on a new home and we're renting a furnished short-term rental place during construction. Think along the lines of an air B&B that you live in for 8-9 months. We don't have room for my gaming rig and desk, sigh, and the old i5 desktop I built for my wife in 2016 appears to be acting up. It seems like a good time to get her a new computer and, a while ago, I decided that, when the time came, for the money and her extremely basic usage case, she'd be better off with a mini-PC. So now I'm looking into Beelink and Geekom mini PCs in the sub $600 range with a Ryzen 7 6800H or comparable PC/integrated GPU combo. With the current insane SSD and memory prices, these seem like an even better deal. What should I consider when purchasing one of these? Are there other brands in that price range I should be considering? She rarely does more than the most basic of computing/web surfing on her PC. In the past she would occasionally play some extremely basic casual games on her PC, but anymore, it's almost always on her ipad and 90% of the time it's Words with Friends.

Also, I've noticed that most of these mini-PCs don't appear to have a dedicated sound output. They have HDMI on the rear, which I'm assuming doubles as sound output, which is great if you plan to use your monitor's speakers, but let's be honest, almost all monitors and TVs have crap sound. She has dedicated, powered desktop speakers. Most of the mini-PCs seem to have an earphone jack on the front panel, so I'm assuming she'd use that to connect to her speakers? Is there a better way to do that?

Thanks.

Maybe not the best reddit for this question, but I will be using Launchbox to drive my arcade machine, so I'll start here. I was never big into racing games, but I know I'll have to have a few arcade classic racing titles on my machine, if nothing else. I don't see having a dedicated wheel and pedals on my machine, but I would like to make it in such a way that I could easily attach my old Microsoft Sidewinder wheel and pedals for the occasional game of Pole Position. How practical is setting up a Sidewinder Wheel with modern systems and getting it working with emulators?

We are heart broken. We’ve been trying to go on an NCL cruise for several years and things just keep happening. I’m starting to think it’s cursed and just isn’t meant to happen.

We had a Caribbean cruise booked in 2023, but we had a grandchild move in with us and couldn’t work it out, so we rescheduled to the next summer. The next summer came and he was still with us, so we wound up cancelling altogether. The grandson is back with his parents, so last fall, my wife booked a Mediterranean cruise. We were supposed to leave yesterday. We have been so excited. I woke up with a headache on 4/19 and, after 10 days, I finally saw my doctor. He put me on blood pressure meds and ordered an MRI. The MRI revealed a non-trauma-caused subdural hematoma! Luckily, it was small, and shouldn’t require surgery, but flying was out of the question, so we had to cancel our cruise. We are utterly heart broken to not be on our cruise at the moment, and really concerned about what money we may get returned, or credit towards a future cruise, if any.