Newsgroup: it.comp.giochi.action
Titolo: Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It

Aspettiamo la seconda versione via.
 
Who wants a cheap HDMI stick that can turn any TV into a full Windows 
computer? Everybody, right? That’s what we thought. Oh god were we 
wrong. When Intel announced the $150 Compute Stick at CES, we figured 
it could become the ultimate miniature PC for all kinds of people. Too 
bad it’s terrible.
 
Theoretically, there are loads of things you could do with a computer 
this tiny. You could work from it, of course, or browse the web from 
your couch. Watch Hulu without a subscription. Stream games from 
another computer. My editor Sean Hollister was excited to load Steam on 
it, plug in an Xbox 360 wireless adapter, and play lightweight games 
like Nidhogg with buddies on a big screen without lugging a console 
around. I was dubiously optimistic I could turn the Stick into a Kodi 
media streamer, accessing videos from my desktop PC over my home 
network.
 
Do some of these things work? Sure. But using this under-equipped PC is 
a giant pain in the ass—to the point that it’s probably not worth it.
 
What is it?
 
An attempt to cram an entire desktop computer into a tiny $150 
HDMI-dongle that you plug into any TV—that doesn’t quite stick the 
landing. Boy, it sure sounded good on paper, though: a quad-core 
1.33GHz Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage all in a 
compact, pocketable package? Yes please. The Compute Stick’s tiny case 
even features a full-sized USB port and a MicroSD card reader. What’s 
not to like? As it turns out, almost everything.
 
Using It
 
Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It
12
 
The Intel Compute Stick, above everything else, is a failure of 
expectations. Intel’s website claims that “it’s ready to get to work or 
have some fun, right out of the box.” Not so much. The Amazon Fire TV 
is ready to have some fun right out of the box. Google’s Chromecast 
dongle is ready to go right out of the box. The Compute Stick is not. 
To get started, it needs things that aren’t in its box—namely a mouse 
and keyboard.
 
Intellectually, I knew going in that the Compute Stick wouldn’t come 
with input devices, but I didn’t quite grasp what that meant. Setting 
up the Compute Stick for the first time was a painful crash course in 
reality. When it tried to walk me through the Windows setup process 
(fun!) I rooted through my office for a spare mouse. Soon it needed me 
to type something, so I dug up a keyboard too. That’s when it suddenly 
dawned on me that I needed to have two USB devices plugged into a 
single port—and that I was screwed.
 
Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It
 
Okay, there are some other options. I could (and did) buy a USB hub. It 
worked okay. The Compute Stick can only supply 500mA of power, but it 
was enough to connect a couple of simple peripherals—though I did run 
into issues with hungrier devices, and a different USB hub failed. 
Eventually, I remembered that I could buy a Logitech couch keyboard 
with a Unifying receiver that can connect a bunch of mice and keyboards 
to a single tiny dongle. Honestly, it’s the only option that makes 
sense.
 
What about Bluetooth peripherals, you say? Utterly worthless. Every 
device I connected suffered from high input latency and a flighty 
connection, translating to laggy mouse input and an infuriating 
keyboard delay. It took other Sean a solid hour to sort out the 
problem: the Compute Stick uses a single chip for both WiFi and 
Bluetooth communications, and it’s terrible at multitasking. The only 
way to fix it is to disable WiFi. Seriously?
 
Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It
 
It took solving all of the Compute Stick’s innate problems ourselves, 
but finally I was ready to get to work. As I prepared to work on 
Gizmodo from the Compute Stick, I cautiously let my optimism for the 
device swell once more. It’s one of Intel’s newer Atom devices, and I 
have nothing but faith in the low-powered computing platform: I own ( 
and love) an Atom-powered Dell Venue 8 Pro and was blown away by the 
Atom x7 CPU in Microsoft’s low-end Surface 3. Intel Atom isn’t the 
badge of shit it once was. The Intel-branded Compute Stick is not the 
best example of the platform’s ability, though.
 
I moved the Stick over to my desktop monitor for the work day, and 
found it able to begrudgingly handle most of my work tasks. The key was 
patience—all of my work programs, chat clients and web tools worked 
fine as long as I gave them time to load. Slack had no problem keeping 
pace with Gizmodo’s main chatroom, but it lagged a few seconds whenever 
I clicked over to a private conversation. Most websites looked great, 
but they took their sweet time to load. The Compute Stick’s not going 
to do much for you in Photoshop or any other processor-intensive 
program, but for $150 it’s not totally awful. It’s just not as good as 
practically anything else.
 
At the end of a slow but mildly productive day with the Stick, we 
decided to kick back with some games. I think I told you how other Sean 
wanted to turn this dongle into a couch gaming PC? Well, we installed 
Steam and loaded up a few 2D classics like Towerfall, Nidhogg, Worms 
Reloaded and Hotline Miami... yet even some of these super-simple games 
weren’t playable. Towerfall ran just fine, as did Jamestown and Metal 
Slug 3, but the normally lightning-fast fencing bouts in Nidhogg felt 
more like playing Rock Paper Scissors in slow motion. Hotline Miami 
chugged at the TV’s native 1080p resolution, and even turned way down 
to 720p it felt laggy and subpar.
 
Even flipping the stick into performance mode—which requires a trip to 
the BIOS—didn’t make things right. Nidhogg got a little more palatable, 
but that’s about it.
 
Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It
 
So we said screw it, let’s try streaming some games from a desktop PC—a 
use case that doesn’t require any real processing power, and one that 
Intel actually advertises for this thing. We turned on Steam In-Home 
Streaming, booted up a gaming PC across the house, shut down all our 
internet apps, and fired up Dark Souls II real quick. The result was 
pure agony.
 
Not only was the game completely and totally unplayable over WiFi, it 
actually completely and totally froze the system on a couple occasions. 
Sure, Intel technically recommends using a USB ethernet dongle or a 
5GHz USB WiFi adapter for Steam streaming—and with them, it works 
great—but that costs money AND takes up another precious USB port. Now 
we’re talking about investing in a USB hub, a network adapter, and 
whatever gamepad you’re using, along with the keyboard and mouse you 
needed to fire this system up. And pray the Stick can provide enough 
power to that USB port to connect them all simultaneously. Oh, and 
don’t forget to install drivers first: when I plugged in my tiny $20 
Edimax 802.11ac dongle into the Stick, it immediately gave me the Blue 
Screen of Death and wouldn’t boot until I yanked it out.
Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It
 
But even if you do invest in the extra gear for streaming, you might 
run into some nasty glitches in Steam’s couch-friendly Big Picture 
Mode. The longer we tried to play games, the more issues cropped up. 
The interface became more and more unresponsive, taking longer and 
longer to respond to presses on the gamepad. On a couple occasions, we 
even saw sparkly graphical corruption—usually a sure sign of an 
overheating GPU. Sure, Big Picture Mode uses a little bit of 
horsepower, but it’s hard to avoid it if you’re playing Steam games 
from the couch—whether you stream them or not.
 
Like
 
I love that the Compute Stick can be powered solely by the USB port on 
my TV. I expected it to need more power, but it doesn’t. One less plug 
in my entertainment center’s rat nest.
 
I’ve been looking for a low-power, lightweight device to use as a Kodi 
multimedia streaming client for my TV—this could be it. It had no 
trouble streaming content from network storage and seems like a good 
solution for those with the patience to set it up.
 
A full-sized USB port on a tiny device. I love it.
 
The box comes with a short HDMI extension cable—just long enough to 
keep the wide dongle from getting in the way of my TV’s other ports.
 
No Like
 
You would think a computer expressly designed to plug into a TV would 
have an option for overscan correction, yes? You’d be wrong—the Compute 
Stick doesn’t support that at all. The dongle worked fine on my TV, but 
my on my friend’s 80-inch projection TV—one of many older TVs where the 
images don’t quite line up—the top, bottom, left and right edges of our 
picture were cut off and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about 
it.
 
Unless I was using a powered USB hub or a Logitech Unifying Connector, 
one USB port just wasn’t enough.
 
The dongle is extremely picky about what’s plugged into it. If I left a 
USB device plugged in, it often wouldn’t boot again until I removed it. 
It got pretty annoying.
 
It’s a little unnerving how warm this device gets... and that it needs 
a tiny fan to cool it down... and that even with that tiny fan, we 
still pushed the Atom chip out of its comfort zone.
 
Should You Buy It?
 
Intel Compute Stick Review: Don’t Buy It
 
No.
 
The Compute Stick is a good idea at what would be a decent price if it 
did a good job. But this stick just has too many problems. It’s hard to 
set up and use. It’s not very powerful. It has weird connectivity 
issues. It’s not even all that portable: yes it slips into your pocket, 
but it’s useless without a bunch of accessories that won’t. Maybe if it 
had some sort of built-in smartphone-based control app things would be 
different, but it doesn’t and they aren’t.
As damning as all those reasons are, there’s an even better reason not 
to buy it: it’s just not a very good deal. Need a media center PC? The 
HP Stream Mini is a better choice—it’s way more powerful, comes with a 
mouse and keyboard and is still small enough to hide behind your HDTV. 
(At just $30 more, it costs less than a Compute Stick plus the 
peripherals you need to make the Compute Stick work.) Just want to 
browse the web from the couch a little? The Chromebit will do that, and 
it’ll cost less, too. There are even better options for streaming video 
games on the way: Valve’s Steam Link will be available this fall for 
just $50.
 
Unless you absolutely need a tiny computer hidden behind your monitor 
(maybe you’re a sadistic office manager hell-bent on forcing your 
employees to use tiny thin clients? Or you really like LCD-based mall 
kiosk signage) I can’t think of a single reason to recommend the Intel 
Compute Stick.
 
Maybe there’s still a future in dongle-based computing, but that future 
doesn’t start here.

> Aspettiamo la seconda versione via.
[]
 
Peccato, speravo in qualcosa di decente per togliere il baraccone dal 
TV e giocare in streaming.
 
Cmq Dollo, a quando il dump completo di un sito web sul NG?
 
-- 
I vescovi non gradiscono la Madonna Barbie. E vedrete quando sarà in 
vendita il Dio Ken.

 Cmq Dollo, a quando il dump completo di un sito web sul NG?
 
Stay Tonno.

 Aspettiamo la seconda versione via.
 
E possibilmente senza la ventolina di raffreddamento...ROTFL.
 
 
-- 
 
 
 
 
----Android NewsGroup Reader----
http://www.piaohong.tk/newsgroup
 

 spazio e andare sul sicuro.
 
Massi', almeno il NUC e' un computer vero. Anzi, se ci spendi su
qualcosa, ne ricavi un SIGNOR computer. E per lo spazio non c'e'
da preoccuparsi, tutti i NUC sono compatibili con le misure VESA
per il fissaggio dei televisori a parete, quindi li puoi
tranquillamente avvitare dietro al televisore e avere l'effetto
all-in-one.
 
 

 Cmq Dollo, a quando il dump completo di un sito web sul NG?
 
lofapposta
 
http://gizmodo.com/intel-compute-stick-review-don-t-buy-it-1699377058
 

bric-out ha pensato forte :

Non ciarfare. MAI PIU.


ciarfare=non ci riprovare?
 
UAI?
 
qualcuno ama le comodità (primo!) :)

 qualcuno ama le comodità (primo!) :)
 
Errore tuo.
E' nella sofferenza che si forgiano le tempre migliori.


"So say we all" 
 
Qualche altro papero in arrivo? :D

Sembra che bric-out abbia detto :

Siamo a quota 1, ancora cova gli altri ovi che potrebbero essere boni 
come no, dice che nel caso smette da sola.
 
Tra parentesi e' toccato chiuderla in una zona separata perche' 
altrimenti il papero e' facile steccoli i piccoli per ribussalla 
subito. Ed infatti sta di fori a beccare la rete con lo sguardo 
assassino.
 
Pensa te che bestia di merda che e'. :D