CompuLab Intense PC Pro Win7

Freezes often. Manufacturer support is a PITA to contact. Unless you have a very very simple use of this in a harsh enviroment I'd suggest just sticking with a tower. Sad....I had high hopes for this.

This machine is incredible. It's tiny, silent, absurdly fast and extremely low-profile. The metal case definitely keeps it cool enough in a typical residential/office environment, though the manufacturer claims it will withstand temperatures a lot higher than you will want to work in. It has plenty of USB/SATA/HDMI inputs to be able to function in most environments. I find that case encourages a minimal approach to what you keep plugged into it because it is such a tangle of cords if you leave all that stuff plugged in. The OS install is super clean with none of the crapware that ships on bigger-branded machines. The elegance of the installation was appreciated. Obviously, this silent little machine should only ship with SSDs, and that's why I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5: it's way too hard to find Intense PCs with SSDs (for now). It's silly that the one moving part in this device is the hard drive. A co-worker got this PC, and immediately made an image of the factory drive using Acronis TrueImage to a Samsung SSD and then installed the SSD in the Intense PC. (He kept the old HDD in the safe in case he needed a clean OS install later, a great use for the cheap conventional HDD that ships with it.) If you want 5 star PC, buy the Intense and drop an SSD into it.

I love the size. It generates little heat. It come with Win 7 Pro which is just right. You can upgrade to Win 8.1 but there is little need to do so, if any. I exchanged the hard drive for an Epson SSD by cloning the hard drive with HDClone [free version] which makes it even faster and almost no heat generated. It works better with a hardwired network but the WiFi is excellent as it is.

I presently use two Intense PC units, one in office and other at home. In office it replaced Lenovo box, at home it replaced laptop. It is a first time ever when my working environment has become quiet. Desktop, laptop, no matter what, the fan of any other computer I ever used eventually started producing annoying noise. You cannot get rid of it, cleaning fan blades and even replacing fans doesn't help. I'm probably more sensitive than others about that kind of annoyance - the background rumble of fan drives me crazy. Switching to Intense PC brought my working environment to absolute silence, really a true miracle for me. It is almost a year since I started using it, so far it runs perfectly. It barely becomes warm during regular usage.