NUC6CAYS conclusion

The installation of the memory and the solid state drive took little time, the initial setup and then the boot into a working Windows 10 Home system was also rapid, but let me put my critical hat on for a short while and discuss the "out of the box" appliance that is the NUC6CAYS.

In 2020, the 2GB RAM that arrives with the NUC is really not sufficient to run Windows 10 well, nor for that matter is the integrated 32GB eMMC drive actually big enough to be considered a boot drive and I really don't think it was adequate even back when this NUC was released in 2016. This was painfully apparent today during the first Windows update cycle when the update to build 1903 stalled and asked me to "free up some space" on the target drive, a drive that only had Windows 10 installed at the factory, nothing else.

I think Windows 10 will run in around 24 GB of RAM, but while updating requires temporary file space on the drive, so the NUC would have been better equipped if that soldered eMMC drive was 64 GB. However, it was an easy job to reinstall Windows from a USB drive and change the primary boot drive to the larger SSD.

I reinstalled Windows 10 Home onto the 240GB SSD which I made drive zero, the 32GB eMMC became drive one and will be used as a small media drive, I will also eventually add a large SD card to the external slot as drive two, more room for the media for the jukebox. The NUC now boots directly from the Kingston SSD.

At the time of writing, a 64GB class 10 SD card is available for around twenty bucks.

The final setup, before adding any programs, was to use the Intel Express BIOS update that is designed to be used on Windows systems from the desktop. This was available on the Intel NUC website and installation was straightforward.

On that topic, a review of the device manager showed that during the installation, and subsequent update process, every hardware driver had automatically been installed.

I like that.

The entire process, even with the subsequent installation of Windows onto the SSD, took only an hour or two, I would say the skill level required is low, but Intel had still not created an out of the box experience in 2016 that I would consider to represent an appliance. The NUC6CAYS is like a four slice toaster that needs some rewiring to actually toast four slices.

It is however, a cracking little machine and I will now load it up with all my audio and video media files and install my favourite players.

It does not toast bread by the way.