Cappuccino Chat - Episode3 - HP Prodesk Mini

welcome to cappuccino chat where we talk a little Tec over a good cup of coffee today we're going to be talking with Leroy one of our longtime technicians here at Southwest networks about the HP Mini you all right Lee right today we're talking about the HP mini and what we why we kind of recommend it a lot so what's one of the main reasons why our customers really like this well you know the initial reaction that I get from our customers when they first walk in is well where's the computer you know am box it I said well this is it right here and they're like that's that's the computer this is the entire computer so this is the whole computer this is exactly the same thing that the one that I'm pulling out is gonna do so the initial shock is the the size the form factor of it yeah I mean this thing's like you know inch and a half tall maybe nine inches by nine inches so it is very small very slim and in the desert you know now we don't have to stick it under our desks and things like that where we get all dusty and dirty and nasty lot of our clients don't mind sticking that on the desk so they can get that power button a lot of yes and it fits easily behind most of the monitors and it's it is out of the way even though it's on their desk they can still you know moving around arrange their desk to where it's pretty much invisible yeah so Leroy what are some other reasons why our clients really liked having these HP minis well the fact that it supports up to three monitors is very good okay so yeah we can we've got the main monitor typically it's a VGA or an HDMI monitor and then we've got two other expansion ports where we can put any kind of monitor on it here in my office I have one of these and I'm running two monitors on my desk and then I also run a TV and on the wall display and some of the dashboards here at the office so I do know a lot of users use it a lot of our clients are going at least dual monitors and I've got more and more talking to me about you know even more than two monitors yeah two three or four monitors the performance also has has been really really really good with these yeah so the new ones now they're supporting the new eighth generation Core i5 i7 processors so we're getting a lot more performance out of these the memory we can go up to 32 gigs of ram in here and then you know all the ones that we're spec'ing out are coming with SSD drives yes and that has been a really key factor in the overall speed of accessing the the data the the overall performance of the of the whole computer from boot up all the way to logging in and getting going it's it's it's amazing yeah I know when I boot mine up in the more it seems like it you know 5 10 seconds and I'm at the login screen and here we go so just to be honest though this this isn't a good fit for everybody so we do have some clients again this is our go-to computer for all of our clients but it's not a good fit for everybody about ninety ninety-five percent of the employees at all the different clients that we work with this is good but it's if you're heavy into graphics right so we can't put a graphics card in here so if you're doing CAD cam maybe heavy Adobe or any kind of 3d type rendering right you know this probably won't be the box for you when you're doing now it's good for the general-purpose everyday office usage it's not gonna be a huge number cruncher you want to look at the bigger boxes for that before Justi the day-to-day usage in an office environment it works perfectly ya know a lot of our clients are open up their core applications they'll have Word Excel maybe multiple Excel spreadsheets outlook and all that stuff open these are great for that kind of stuff but when it comes to you know CAD and cam and heavy graphics doing 3d rendering making videos like we're doing here and editing those videos this probably is not the box now Google Maps and things like that just general stuff these are fine the built-in graphics card is good for that so but we're limited the other option the other reason this doesn't fit everybody is we are limited in the expandability that we can like we say we can't put a graphics card in here we can't really put extra network cards or things of that nature in here so again when those needs come up we can't do that now we can throw on scanners many printers it has a four USB ports in the back and there's two in the front it's got your USB C for charging your new phones and some of your stuff headphone microphone jack all that good stuff your Gigabit Ethernet so it's got pretty much everything like I said 99 percent of our clients you know 90 to 95 percent of our clients it can do everything you want it to do size of the hard drive we can get those again expandability though we're limited to the one hard drive that comes in it we can add external things of that nature so and I know one of the other things that comes up I don't really see it as a con but some clients they're still used to having a DVD drive right yes so but I mean it's been years really since anyone ship DVDs the majority of applications are all downloadable through the website anyway you we do get the request no I absolutely have to have a DVD player it does support an external DVD player which mounts at the bottom of the case and plugs into the back through a single USB cable and then suprises yeah and it's a it's a writable DVD so you can you know burn your DVD if you're creating some backup or some files for your clients or if you just want to read a DVD or a CD that someone's coming to you so I mean they're great great computers again they fit nineteen ninety to ninety-five percent of our clients a good price point not much different than your normal ones a little bit cheaper than your full towers that you're used to so that's good so one last thing before we go so this is cappuccino chats we do talk a little Tech over some coffee so today we're both enjoying some of our coffee espresso roast from coffee with a KO FFI I've got mine with a little little cream and some cinnamon in it and Leroy is going old-school and it's just plain old stock straights coffee basic black coffee for me I like to taste the coffee there you go all right you