Last Updated on November 3, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
Earlier this year at CES, HP introduced its HP Stream Mini ($180) and Pavilion Mini ($320 and $450) mini-desktops. They’re small, inexpensive, and in the case of the Stream, silent. They turn out to be surprisingly upgradeable as well. Ars Technica has details and benchmarks (link removed in retaliation for Conde Nast’s 11/3/2025 layoffs, sorry not sorry) but of course I have my own priorities based on their discoveries.
My first priority would definitely be to upgrade the memory to at least 8 GB, but if you’re doing that, you might as well spend $50 more and go all the way to 16 GB. By the time you really need 16 GB, DDR3 memory may be more expensive than it is today. A good-quality Crucial 8 GB SODIMM runs about $60 right now, so a pair of them would run $120. If you can’t afford that in a single purchase, buy a single 8 GB SODIMM, take the performance hit, and replace the factory-installed SODIMM with a second matched 8 GB SODIMM when you can afford it.
My other order of business would be the SSD. All of these machines include an M.2 port, but since it’s SATA M.2 rather than PCIe M.2, there’s no real speed advantage. You could potentially get better performance by putting a higher capacity drive in the SATA bay, since the workload is spread out over more chips. But it’s nice to have two options for adding SSDs.
Ars also has a method for upgrading the wi-fi to put it on 5 GHz 802.11ac. I’d rather put that $40 toward more memory or SSD storage, but if fast wi-fi is a priority for you, it’s nice to have the option.
The other thing I would do is install Windows 10 the day it’s released. A clean install, of course, to get rid of the bloatware.
So, Celeron, Pentium, or Core? For the price, I’d probably go with the $180 Celeron model. The other machines are faster, but a Celeron with lots of memory and a fast SSD is still a very capable machine, and you could deck out the Celeron and be out less than the cost of the Core-based model.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Hi, May I ask if it support 4GB ram?
It sure does.
Thanks, Dave for your prompt reply. But I installed a Kingston 1600 4GB and it just couldn’t recognize it. Did I miss any steps?
It should just be a matter of plugging it in. I would make sure it’s seated all the way in, and maybe try switching it with the other memory that was already in there to see if you get different results. It could be the memory is defective, but Kingston memory is very rarely dead on arrival–I don’t think I’ve ever seen any bad Kingston memory. If you have another system that takes DDR3 memory, you can try the memory in that just to be sure the memory isn’t the issue.