Lenovo Announces a $130 Windows PC in a Stick

The CPU is fast enough for moderate web browsing, using Office, playing videos and music, etc. In other words, the casual tasks of an "average user". Of course, it wasn't made to compile software or run complex simulations, and it has some thermal throttling (my tablet has no fans and this stick doesn't appear to have any, either), so if you use the four cores to the maximum for some time, the speed will start decreasing from 1.56 GHz (I have made the max go as low as 0.96 GHz due to throttling). This is the kind of thing that doesn't show in all benchmarks, so beware. (To be fair, spec sheets also don't say that when cores are not fully used, turboboost kicks in and a single core can be working at 1.8 GHz for quite some time).

The integrated Intel graphics are (as usual) good for media playing, web browsing and dealing with Windows UI animations, but forget any kind of gaming that demands more than a smartphone game.

The biggest problem, for me at least, is the lack of RAM: 2 GB of RAM are filled quite fast with 6-8 Chrome tabs and some background software open. It also doesn't take much to fill the whole 4 GB of commit space, and of course, bringing pages in and out of the pagefile is quite slow (the storage is flash, but not quite a SSD). It is easy to make Windows show a "system running low on memory" message just by opening 20 Chrome tabs, some with heavy sites. If all you want to do is run Microsoft Office, I found it to actually be much lighter on memory use than I previously thought (I never saw OneNote, Excel or Word go beyond 90 MB).

Storage gets quite full very easily, mine is always with ~1 GB free (Windows and Office installed on C:, most other things installed on the SD card), and this is using things like NTFS compression. If this stick is like my tablet, it will have 6 GB of storage "wasted" on a recovery partition. Also, the trick Microsoft recommends OEMs use for fitting Windows on systems with as few as 16 GB of storage, which consists on using WIM images for storing the system files, works only while the install is fresh: as more and more system updates are installed, the altered files seem to be stored out of the image, which means there's effectively more space used with Windows files than with a normal install. I have "reserved" the Windows 10 update and I'm eager to see how it will deal with background-downloading the (possibly gigabytes) of files into a system with only 1 GB free.

I once thought of installing Visual Studio just to see how slow it would run, but gave up once I understood most components must be installed to C: (it appears that installing VS effectively equates to "extending Windows" with developer tools).

I am still quite happy with the purchase (it was about $150) since it allows for doing things Android tablets don't do, like running the full MS Office or using proper desktop versions of browsers and other software. I imagine this stick opens the same kind of possibilities.