Intel NUC makes a fantastic Zwift computer (and Samsung DeX is pretty cool for homework)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 5 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

With my tech background, my family is more fortunate than many when it comes to finding suitable equipment for the kids to use whilst school is closed. Even so, we’ve struggled with both my teenagers sharing one laptop – they really do both need to use it at the same time.

We thought that one of them would be using a tablet would be OK, but that wasn’t really working out either. Then, a few weeks ago, we thought I’d found a great solution to the problem. My youngest has a Samsung Galaxy S10 smartphone, which supports Samsung DeX. We tried it out with the Apple USB-C to HDMI/USB-A power adapter and it worked a treat:

The only problem was the keyboard. I tried some Bluetooth keyboards for Android but they all had small keys. And we tried a normal PC keyboard, which worked well but lacked a trackpad and didn’t have a USB port for a mouse. Using the phone as a trackpad was awkward, so I was going to have to buy another keyboard and either a trackpad or a mouse – or find a way of splitting the USB-A socket to run two devices. It was all a bit Heath Robinson so I started looking for another approach…

I had been using an old laptop for Zwifting but, after seeing Brian Jones (@brianjonesdj) tweet about an Intel NUC, I realised that I could get one for not too much money, hook it up to the TV in the Man Cave and release the laptop for general family use.

It took a while to decide which model to go for but, in the end, I settled for the Intel Dual Core 8th Gen i3 Short NUC Barebone Mini PC Kit, with 120GB SSD and 8GB RAM (all from Scan Computers) – and it is a fantastic little thing:

I did spend far too much time downloading the latest version of Windows 10 because I thought it was corrupted when I didn’t read the error message properly. Actually it was a problem with the USB thumb drive I was using, fixed with a full format (instead of a quick one).

Anyway, here’s Microsoft’s instructions for creating Windows 10 boot media. F10 is the magic key to make the NUC boot from an alternative device but I found USB boot only worked at the rear of the machine – not using the ports on the front. Finally, here’s a location for downloading Windows 10 ISOs (it doesn’t really matter where you get the media, as long as it’s an official source, so if you download from a Volume Licence or Visual Studio subscription, that should be fine too).

With the NUC in the cave, the laptop has been released for general family computing. My Microsoft 365 Family subscription (formerly Office 365 Home) gives access to 6 copies of the Office apps so that more than covers us the Windows and macOS PCs used by myself, my wife and the boys. (The Microsoft 365 subscription also includes Office mobile apps for iOS/Android and 1TB cloud storage in OneDrive as well as other benefits).