Amazingly enough, machines like this will run Microsoft Office with home-sized documents, but they are underpowered for what your mother needs. 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.

However, you can easily check this by plugging mum’s current Windows laptop into her TV set.

Based on my long experience of watching TV in normal-sized living rooms, I’ll be surprised if this is practical. They needed radically different approaches, and different-sized icons and text.Įven 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.

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. 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. There are a couple of reasons why I don’t think it’s a good idea. 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. At typical TV viewing distances it will be very hard to see and work with the text in Office documents.

Mini pc windows 7