pc or mini?

I'll chime in here, having built many pcs over the years I still go with the tower form factor. Out of habit I suppose but i do see that there are some very good options in the mini box area for those that can find one that has all the stuff you will ever want in it at time of purchase. Generally the smaller form factors do not have space to add stuff later or upgrade with things like video and sound "baked on" to the mainboard and zero expansion slots. Sure you can change out the SSD for a larger one if you need space for storing stuff, and you can increase the RAM should you need more, but adding a drive or improving the sound or video isn't happening. Then there is repairability, if the power supply dies can it be replaced at the user level, if you want a better CPU can it be done and still interface with the cooling system? I tend to think of minis as a notebook pc, you got what you got and if it dies or becomes obsolete, shop for a new one, better one.
It's just a thought.     

Thanks to Doug and Richard. I already have a laptop but find they have a tendancy to let me down at the worst possible time, I used to use it for stage work! I think I've decided on a tower PC as I want a dvd drive. Amazon have pages of reconditioned PCs at attractive prices and win11 installed so I may go that way. Any further advice will be welcome like how to get my stuff from old to new PC?
Richard my son lives in a Perth suburb...he says it's really hot at the moment. He's tone deaf so he doesn't follow me...lol     

Oh, forgot to add - I thought I'd miss a CD/DVD player on my Mac, but we bought a USB based one, which we share among the family - I was surprised at how often it just sits on the shelf these days, as most items (software/videos/etc) are downloadable. The times I do use it are for ripping rare CD's from Perth bands ...

Cheers

Richard     

Hope I'm not too late and you already purchased. We are no longer living in hard disk drive era and if you are it's time for you to upgrade. Even the SSD which is fairly new is being pushed to the side by the newer faster bigger storage size NVME flash drives. I've seen some of these newer small form factor or mini's and the specs are outstanding. For the first few months. As soon as you start downloading and saving pictures videos BAM it slows down to a crawl or even worse blue screen of death. I work with pc's everday for lots of businesses. we don't ever recommend minis. But for some reason they choose to go the mini way and then like clockwork the tickets start coming in. I believe that packaging all this equipment in such a small package just makes the computer start to bake itself. So I would say no don't go the mini way and if you don't want to go full blown monster desktop there's a middle ground. You can buy something like a dell optiplex. Now i can't say which model out of the thousands that dell has because that would come down to your budget and what you plan to do with it. So let's say something like a dell optiplex 7000 series small form factor but it's inbetween mini and monster desktop. Also you get what you pay for and i cannot stress that enough. But...ah man this is difficult because the advertising sometimes makes a top of the line pc seem so great but it will suck and you could have gone cheaper for a better pc. I can continue but as technology just booms, it's just crazy. If you tell me what your looking for and what you will be using it for I can recommend something that will at least give you 5 to 8 years worth of tech life expectancy rather than the 2 to 3. Hope that wasn't to to long and somewhat helpful but my mind was racing with so many directions i could go with type of processor, ram size, battery capacity, integrated graphics or pcix16 graphics cards, fan cooling, water cooling, Solid state drive , nvme flash drives,  power supply wattage WOOOOOOO!! I feel like building a new pc now!!!  (DO NOT GO MAC)!!

As long as the ssd has the main operating system the HDD is great for storing all your stuff. I too actually use a 2 TB HDD for all my stuff. Good luck.

Great!! Which model did you get? And which OS did you go from and to .. ?

Cheers

Richard     

Well awesome those are good specs. curious if that harddrive is an ssd or hard disk drive. And everyone has got to go through the win 11 learning curve. It's just the way it is. Every six months or so take a can of compressed air. open up the case and give it a good dusting. It will keep performing at it's peak if it is staying cool. Any questions feel free.