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It is barebones + case (you can buy NUCs without cases). However, I would suggest this one instead:
http://amzn.com/B00HVKLSVC
Looks like the price went up a bit, because it's normally $135.
Just add RAM and USB drive and you are good to go.
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ahmed.
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Okay, why do you recommend that one? I am having trouble finding RAM that can be bought from the same place. Also what do you mean by USB drive? I was planning on putting in a 2.5" inch hard drive, wouldn't that be good enough?
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Well from the looks of it the one you picked doesn't support a 2.5 hard drive. Also off the top of my head I think its the older version and also lacks wifi.
He said a USB because that's all you need to install xbmc to if your going to be streaming your content. You don't need the capacity of a hdd
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ahmed.
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The chromebox's design is good and the fact that it is already ready to go out of the box is neat, but it seems like the NUC is worth it in the long run. At least with the NUC, I can upgrade the RAM eventually and swap hard drives. Plus the biggest thing with it is that I can install any OS I want.
I looked up videos that show windows on chromebox, but I could not find any that showed how to get windows 7 on it. Also I am not sure if there would be any problems in getting windows on it in the first place.
I am getting the NUC and the RAM itself from tigerdirect.ca and a $20 generic hard drive from amazon.ca, I wish I could save more money by buying a 2GB RAM instead of 4GB, but I don't want to order the wrong one and end up returning it since it might not be compatible.
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You can upgrade both the Ram and SSD on the ASUS Chromebox quite easily so no problem there.
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techmd
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I agree that if I was wanting it to be able to run windows then the NUC is the route I would go. I'm in the market for a simple server as a WMC backend and am not considering a chromebox for that task.