ASUS CHROMEBOX-M004U Desktop

Fantastic little gadget! I've had the Asus Chromebox M004U, the inexpensive one-$169.00, 2GB ram, 16GB SSD-for a little over a month and from using it, I'll state that it is better than advertised. When the box arrived from Amazon, it didn't look big enough for a "real" computer. Bear in mind the Chromebox is only 5" x 5" x 1.5" in size. I took out the Chromebox, plugged in the power supply and looked for a cable to hook up a monitor. Neither a DVI or a VGA plug will work. I did find an HDMI-to-HDMI cable which fits the Box, but not either of my monitors. I was thinking about buying a new monitor when I remembered that my 32" LG TV had a second HDMI port. It's mounted on a swing-arm close to my computer desk in my "man-cave" so I can catch football games and NASCAR away from the rest of the family. I pulled the arm & TV over closed to the desk, pressed the power switch and got a picture. The set-up went quickly and easily. I already use Google Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system is based on it so I was functional on that part. I entered my wifi password and, just like that, I was on the web. All my favorites were there just like on my PC. I surfed around to several sites and everything looked as normal. I should mention that everything was fast. I also already use Gmail, so the email part went fast. It's exactly the same as Gmail on my PC. I think you can set it up for Outlook, but since I use Gmail, I didn't bother to try that. It comes up fast. Someone told me 7 seconds. I have counted 1-thousand, 2-thousand... and quit because I never got over 7-thousand. You can't get to what you have on your PC hard drive. If you have saved it to Skydrive, you can easily find it with your Chromebox. I was getting worried. Everything was going quickly and smoothly, then I hit a snag. I went looking for a file, any file, and couldn't find one. Well, Toto, we're not in Windows land any more. We have to go see the Wonderful Wizard of Google. Let me give you a translation from Windows to Google for some I have picked up. 1. First, think of your Chromebox as a big Android phone. 2.There are a group of icons in the lower left side of the monitor just like Windows. Google calls this line of icons the SHELF. 3. The first icon is black with 9 little squares like a keypad. This is effectively your Start button. In Google-ese, it's your APPS. 4. You can move apps to and from the shelf. Right click on the icon in your apps and select "Pin to shelf." If the "Pin to..." sounds familiar, it's just like an Android phone. 5. Somewhere in your apps you'll see a blue, green & yellow triangle. This is Google drive. Think of it as your C: drive. You automatically get 15GB G-drive space free. When you buy a Chromebox or Chromebook laptop, you get another 100GB free for two years, as I recall. I was wondering what Big G was going to hit me for extending the 100GB. I checked and when I did, it was $2 per month. Pretty cheap. 6. I already had Microsoft Skydrive, (or is it Onedrive or is MS trying to confuse us). It also works just like Google drive. 7. If you are paranoid about storing things in the cloud, you are in trouble because everything is automatically stored in your cloud. 8. Speaking of saving, don't look for a save button. There is none. Remember, everything is automatically saved to the cloud. 9. You can hook up an external hard drive, but I haven't tried that. The Chrome computers DO NOT support CD or DVD drives yet. 10. Google Docs can read all my Word files and save as either .docx or Google files. No problem here. 11. Amazon Prime videos work just great through the Chromebox. So does Kindle for books (Kindle Cloud). Bottom line: Since I got this little jewel a month or so ago, I have been on my PC maybe a dozen times. Some of those were to start moving more pictures and notes on radio control airplanes(my hobby) to either Skydrive or Google Drive. The Chromebox makes my PC seem slow and antiquated. Sure it doesn't do Photoshop and others, but for surfing, watching videos and movies, reading Kindle books and doing the occasional doc or spreadsheet, it's been excellent for me. For what I do at home, I'll take a Chromebox over a PC any day. Added May 10, 2015: It just dawned on me that I haven't turned on my Windows PC in 2 weeks! It's still fast. It books up fast (7 seconds to the password prompt-I timed it). It shuts down fast-5 seconds. I've yet to see a prompt like, "Do not turn off or unplug your computer. Installing updates 1 to 21." Google print works fine, even from my phone-a Nokia Windows phone, no less. It goes through wifi & email. Double glad I spent the $160 for it.

I have two of the Chromebox M004U (Celeron) models. (three now, see updates below) I installed an alternative BIOS (Coreboot) on both of them so I could replace Chrome OS. One of them is being used as an HTPC running the XBMCbuntu distribution (version 13.0 upgraded to 13.2). Stock hardware (Celeron, 2 GB RAM, 16 GB SSD). It handles any video I throw at it perfectly, even the ~45Mbps video from my DSLR camera. I don't have any Bluray rips, but I have no doubt it would work perfectly with them. It drives my 1080P television without any problems, both video and audio over HDMI. My media library is on a USB 3.0 attached HDD and I can get 140MB/sec sequential (not random) reads from it. I'm setting up the other one as a desktop PC for my kids. I installed an additional 2 GB of RAM and upgraded the M.2 SSD to 128 GB. This too has the custom BIOS installed. Edbuntu worked without issue, but I ditched it because of Unity. It's now running Linux Mint. All of the educational software I have installed (Gcompris, Tuxmath, Tuxpaint, etc) works like a charm. My favourite software on here, an astronomy program called Celestia, works great! I've installed optional higher resolution textures for all of the planets. It runs at an average of 30-45FPS with some dips when zooming in and out on planets with 32K and 64K textures. All of this while driving a 1600x1200 ASUS IPS display at full resolution with Celestia maximised (filling up the whole screen). And I have the Chromebox mounted on the back of the monitor with the included VESA mount plate. Linux Mint runs like a charm overall. Running Firefox and LibreOffice also works really well. And booting from a cold state takes seconds. I am very, very satisfied with these little Chromeboxes. Edit (2014/12/02): I picked up a third one on black friday for $110 just to play with, was specifically interested in loading OpenBSD on it. 5.6-stable doesn't work because of the lack of USB 3.0 (xhci) support, but 5.6-current installed without issue. The wireless adapter wasn't detected, but the Realtek ethernet device works. I have it driving a 1920x1200 display over HDMI. What a fantastic little piece of hardware! Edit (2015/01/30): I've been using this model Chromebox for about six months now. I have not encountered any problems. Still as zippy as the day I got them, cool to the touch, and stable. I have three of them and I want to get more! Just to recap, I've installed various Linux and BSD based operating systems on these puppies: * FreeBSD (so I could play around with bhyve) * OpenBSD * Linux Mint * Debian * Ubuntu * Edbuntu * XBMC Live (Ubuntu based) I love these little machines! Edit (2016/04/05): I'm still using three of these computers. One running XBMC, another running Linux Mint for my kids, and the third one now has CentOS installed on it. The second m004u with Linux Mint has been used for a few months now to play Minecraft. It gets ~30-45 FPS without any add-ons installed at 1920x1200 resolution. My kids have been having a blast with it. The third m004u with CentOS had its storage upgraded to a 256GB m.2 drive and 16 GB of memory was installed. It is running Xen 4 (Xen4CentOS) and I have eight different virtual machines running on it: * repository server running Apache and SSH. * shell server (for remote access) * minecraft server (has had up to seven users on it at the same time) * minecraft pocket edition server (running ImagicalMine, has had up to five users on it at the same time) * Three separate web servers (LAMP) for some friends and family member's websites * UniFi Controller Most of these virtual machines are running CentOS 7. The UniFi Controller VM is running on Debian. When a lot of people are playing Minecraft I've seen some slow downs, but for the most part the little box is running like a charm and has been stable for a full year. These machines are awesome!

Chrome OS is great. But you probably know that already. What can I add about this device? Well, it's small and noiseless and comes with a VESA mounting plate that means you can potentially slot it onto the back of a monitor or television, clearing more space on your desk, etc. You don't normally need more than 2gb RAM for Chrome OS so the memory is fine but it's really cool that you can easily upgrade it yourself if you want, for about $20-30. Likewise, the 16gb SSD storage - I barely use it anyway, except for temporary download files, as everything is easily stored on the cloud via GDrive. The displayport and HDMI outputs make it easy to attach two monitors at once, for an extended desktop, which is how I've got it set up. I've attached a Logitech keyboard and trackpad (instead of a mouse) and all the peripherals worked perfectly. The only minor glitch I had is that for some reason the ethernet and wifi can't be enabled at the same time without killing the connection, but that doesn't matter because it's permanently on ethernet anyway. It's pretty fast. It boots up in - I dunno - a few seconds, like Chromebooks do. A few comments for anyone who doesn't know about Chrome OS... 1. It's based on Linux but with a user interface that's totally optimised for web browsing via Google's Chrome browser. 2. Can you use MS-Office? Well, you probably don't need to. You can easily use Google's cloud-based office suite to do most of the same basic stuff, including opening MS-Word files. However, what Microsoft don't like to mention is that, obviously, they've got free cloud-based versions of their own office suite anyway, so if you just log into Onedrive you can use the MS-Word web app online, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc., anyway. There are also plenty of other office-type web apps available. 3. Chrome OS is fast because it doesn't install much software apart from the Operating System so no more endless updates. 4. It's very unlikely you'll ever get a virus on this thing, and it has protection built in - unlike Windows, which is a massive virus magnet. 5. You can do most things on the web now so there's not much need to install software on your pc for 99% of what most people do most of the time, arguably. 6. It's cheap, so there's not much worry about replacing it in the unlikely event you run into a problem. However, these things are likely to last a lot longer than Windows-based devices, for several reasons. 7. It does something simple and useful but does it really, really well. 8. It runs offline apps, contrary to what critics initially said. You can wordprocess and edit text offline, and Google have just said that you'll soon be able to watch movies from Google Play offline. You can already play movies or music stored to the local drive offline anyway. 9. Chrome consistently outperforms other browsers and now has better features so overall it provides the best web browsing experience but with the momentum from Chrome OS it's now developing more and more, and you get automatically updated seamlessly in the background. 10. If you mainly work on the internet and compose simple documents then this may be the ideal machine for you. I have this and an HP Chromebook and I love them both. The Chromebox is probably a bit quicker even though it's got half the RAM.

I'm using it converted to run Openelec so I can use it as a Kodi media center. I wanted to replace an old Nettop which developed issues. Works perfectly, my most stable HTPC yet.

We wanted to hook up a simple computer to our TV in the living room as a media PC.After weeks of researching computer options, bare bones, other computers that didn't come with software or an os, etc. I found the chromebox. This is exactly what I wanted. The design is great! We hooked it up by HDMI to our receiver (Onkyo HT-R393 5.1 channel) in the "PC" input. Turned it on and logged in to our long standing gmail accounts, and we were off! Flawless. Our profiles loaded up right away. Because of all of the available USB ports, we hooked up an external hard drive to watch our saved movie files, have a usb stick on the front with other media files, the keyboard uses a fob, and there is still one usb open, conveniently on the front. I really appreciate the simple os. I haven't used the Google Docs function, but if I were working on business items, I could easily use my TV for a presentation, very cool and this little box is so portable! I haven't yet used Google to purchase movies or music. I will update my review once I have. I'm using the Logitech Wireless Touch Keyboard K400 Plus (920-007119) . It works perfectly as mouse and keyboard in one, it also acts as a remote to turn the chromebox on and off. I will try to check in again down the road, but 2 days in now, I'm very impressed with this purchase and would recommend. We wanted it mostly for streaming, and we've been running Netflix over wireless and there is no delay and the image is great. If you're looking for a convenient media PC at a great price point, give this a try - though if you don't already use gmail, it may not be as convenient.

Muy buena opción para negocio donde necesitas mostrar publicidad, vídeos o contenido a tus clientes, por su opción de trabajar con dos pantallas a la vez

Buenisimo producto. Solo que a Los 5 días bote una pastilla mientras estaba conectado y se desconfiguro u tuve que cargarle el chrome os con un 4 gb flash drive. Apartir de eso trabaja muy bien el aparato.