I am now the proud owner of a 'new old stock' Dell 3470 Mini desktop (£260) which is now in bits on the dining room table awaiting upgrading.
I'm impressed by the size, it is half the width and height of the desktop it will be replacing. It has a couple of USB3 sockets at the front, built in Wi-fi and an SD card reader. Apart from some obvious shortcomings, it's perfect for my use which is mostly browsing and office.
The shortcomings;
It came with 4GB of memory, just enough to run windows 10. I've got a 16GB on order which should arrive sometime tomorrow. I was a bit worried about the height of the new memory modules as space is tight and it amused me to see that the photo of the new modules on the website turned out to be life-sized on my display. I ended up holding the existing 4GB module up to the screen to establish height and I'm pretty certain they will fit.
Whether or not the processor is an upgrade or downgrade is debatable, it comes with an i3 8100 (8th generation from 2017) a quad core at 3.6GHz which should run Word fairly well
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
Hard drive is glacially slow and suprisingly a fully sized 3.5" unit - This is annoying as I'll need an adaptor to drop an SSD in. In rummaging, I turned up a full sized 2TB Seagate Firecuda SSHD drive. Nowhere near as fast as an SSD, considerably faster than a hard drive.
Unfortunately, the design of the internals means you have to remove various layers of components to get to the memory, hence the bits all over the table. Once the new memory is in, I can reinstall the DVD drive and the replacement hard drive sited at the top of the stack of components.
I do have a questions for those who do more software stuff. I'm getting rather rusty these days.
Machine came with Windows 10 home pre-installed, I've got the serial number and would hope that I can download an image of Windows 10 home, burn to DVD and do a fresh install without licencing issues? If I have to, I could clone the hard drive but I'd much rather have a fully clean install.
Regards,
B.