If you’re new here, you might not know this, but I have a very serious problem: if someone sends me pictures of a goofy-looking decade-old mini PC, I basically have to buy it and mess with it. This time it was the Acer Veriton N2620G (2013), and I picked mine up for $14… plus $14 shipping. On paper it’s kind of a cool little nettop with a weird port layout, mini PCIe slots, and even a slimline SATA connector on the board. In reality, this thing almost broke me. I started with the usual basics—getting power figured out (19V but with a less common barrel size), opening it up (plastic clips from hell), swapping the HDD for an SSD (which required way more disassembly than it had any right to), replacing thermal paste, and dealing with a completely dead CMOS battery… with a three-pin connector, because of course it was. After upgrading to 8GB DDR3L, I ran benchmarks and power testing, tried it as a basic Windows/Linux desktop, and even used it as a remote client with Moonlight. Then I got into the “homelab potential” side: Proxmox + a Home Assistant VM worked fine, idle power could be tuned down to around 9W, and the first mini PCIe slot even took an NVMe adapter (limited to PCIe Gen2 x1, and you’ll need a bootloader workaround). But the second slot did something I’ve never seen before—my SSD got painfully hot and didn’t show up. After Batocera also refused to cooperate, I tapped out. My takeaway: don’t go hunting for these… but if you find one basically free, it can handle lightweight services.