In my radio shack I have a ‘Desktop’ PC. A traditional machine attached to a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. My current machine was gifted to me by a local company that was refreshing its hardware. It’s about 15 years old, and works fine but it consumes a fair bit of electricity by modern standards. I wanted something I could leave switched on for long periods without worrying about the electricity bill.
So, I headed to the usual auction sites and found myself a Dell Wyse 5070 complete with matching power supply for less than £50. It’s lovely.
Compared to the machine it replaces, it is physically very tiny. It has plenty of USB 3 ports at the front and the back, and some are in the fancy new USB-C format. There are two 3.5mm audio jacks at the front and one at the back. It even has a proper old-fashioned serial port, which is actually quite useful for interfacing with my older radio equipment. There are no fans inside, and it has solid-state storage, so no noisy hard disk either. It’s completely silent in operation.
Performance is great. It has double the RAM of the previous machine at 8GB. The processor has four cores instead of one. The M.2 SSD is amazingly quick compared to the hard disk in the old machine. The best part though is that power consumption is about 10 watts, so I don’t need to worry too much if I leave it switched on all day.