Any of you using all in one PCs?..........Thoughts?

[Jaan]

Hi all,

 

We're at the beginning of our rolling IT plan, and we're looking at shaking up our hardware a bit.

Right now, we've got Stone PCs in unistands (pic attached), but we're thinking about moving over to an All-in-One solution.

I know a lot of companies make these (not just Stone; Very PC does them, too), so I just wanted to tap into your experience. Have any of you guys worked with AIOs before and have any feedback, good or bad? and the brands you're using

The only non-negotiables for us are:

• We don't need touchscreens.

• Anti-tamper features are an absolute must-have.

Any quick insights you can share would be a huge help as we start narrowing down options.

 

*I don't want any suppliers to contact me with regards to this just yet.

 

Cheers

 

 

[Andycat]

We've used HP, Dell and now Stone. All have been good and reliable.

[DalekSec]

Back when i worked in Edu, we used Dell AIOs, rarely had any issues and reduces the amount of cabling needed!

[6Foot3]

We use these for Classrooms.

 

Five year warranty direct from Dell.

They usually come out the next day to repair, but to be honest, we haven't had many repairs given how many we have.

 

Also has a pop up webcam and built in sound bar.

 

 

[Rob_D]

We've had pretty good truck out of Dell and HP All-in-ones. The lenovo ones we got brake if you look at the funy.

 

Recently we've been moving away from AIOs back to mini/SFF PC and screen as they tend to be cheaper for the same spec.

[Jaan]

Anybody able to share some pics?

[Andycat]

Be aware, a lot now use a big power brick. We got caught out when the 2 Dells attached, bought a year apart, went from internal Kettle lead to brick. Since then we've moved to Stone, also attached, as they won the framework bid, and were one of only 2 replies that had inbuilt PSU.

[Ratcliffepg]

Dell AIO for a long time.... brought these in the summer holidays come we an internal PSU OptiPlex AIO 7420 65W

[Olliedawg]

Nothing bad to say about Dell AIO's. We have a load of 7460 AIO's... never really had an issue

[hallamke]

Whilst long dead now most of our estate from 2006 - 2018 utilised the RM One MK2 & 3 AIOs. Other than a spate of PSU failures on the second batch (replaced under warranty) we had no issues.

 

We replaced the "guts" in short order given the low spec of the original components.  Other than the replacement cost of the internals and a Windows licence they held up remarkably well over the years 😉 

 

We've gone the HP SFF route now as the screens on the off the shelf AIOs dont seem to be particuarly durable from what I've seen.  As others have mentioned it is also cheaper to replace an individual screen versus an AIO.  

[Squelch]

I can remember replacing the insides of a lot of RM One's. The cuts to my fingers were savage.

[talksr]

18 hours ago, Jaan said:

Hi all,

 

We're at the beginning of our rolling IT plan, and we're looking at shaking up our hardware a bit.

Right now, we've got Stone PCs in unistands (pic attached), but we're thinking about moving over to an All-in-One solution.

I know a lot of companies make these (not just Stone; Very PC does them, too), so I just wanted to tap into your experience. Have any of you guys worked with AIOs before and have any feedback, good or bad? and the brands you're using

The only non-negotiables for us are:

• We don't need touchscreens.

• Anti-tamper features are an absolute must-have.

Any quick insights you can share would be a huge help as we start narrowing down options.

 

*I don't want any suppliers to contact me with regards to this just yet.

 

Cheers

 

 

 

 

We use a mix of Dell and Lenovo. The Dell we use is similar to what you have already....a monitor attached to a Dell stand with a PC on the back. Only issue with these is someone thought it would be fun to remove the screw that holds the monitor to the stand.If someone moved the height adjustable part of the monitor up, it would fall off of the stand and almost hit them in the face. The screws are thumb screws which isn't ideal as easily taken, but these can be changed. 

 

My all in one of choice is the Lenovo Tiny-in-one and accompanying Thinkstation PC. I always over buy on the PCs and have a small number sat in the cupboard fully preped and cloud-joined. If there is a harware faliure, I simply slide out the faulty Thinkstation and stick another straight in from my cupboard. Minimum downtime and disruption for the end user, I am able to take the faulty unit away for it to be worked on (again minimum disruption for end user). There are no fiddly cables or screws, it is nice and simple to remove a PC and replace it. 

 

In all the years we've had them, we have had a handful of faliures and one Tiny-in-one monitor faily, but the issues have always been out of warranty when they are +5 years old which is to be expected tbh. 

 

Hope that helps ☺️

[Disease]

18 hours ago, alordcharlie said:

We use these for Classrooms.

 

Five year warranty direct from Dell.

They usually come out the next day to repair, but to be honest, we haven't had many repairs given how many we have.

 

Also has a pop up webcam and built in sound bar.

 

 

I have just bought 70 of these direct from DELL.

[Jaan]

1 minute ago, Disease said:

I have just bought 70 of these direct from DELL.

 

Spec and price if able?

 

Thanks

[robintech]

18 hours ago, Andycat said:

Be aware, a lot now use a big power brick. We got caught out when the 2 Dells attached, bought a year apart, went from internal Kettle lead to brick. Since then we've moved to Stone, also attached, as they won the framework bid, and were one of only 2 replies that had inbuilt PSU.

 

One of the reasons I got the Dell AIOs was the kettle lead, not sure if its rational but i can't stand power bricks. Even had a Juniper  SRX320 that our ISP supplied for 4g backup that came with a  massive power brick for some reason and sometimes monitors catch me out.

[Disease]

Dell Pro 24 AIO PLUS

Intel Core  Ultra 7 265 vPro Chip

16GB Ram

512GB SSD

 

£720 per unit.

[dhicks]

21 hours ago, Jaan said:

Any quick insights you can share would be a huge help as we start narrowing down options.

 

For staff, in classrooms and some admin offices, we have 24" screen Lenovo all-in-ones. They've been pretty reliable over the last three years or so, we had a few in the initial batch that needed replacing under warrenty, so having a few spares is always a good idea so you have enough to swap out while repairs are on-going. They are very fiddly to take apart yourself, we found it tricky to even get the back off without the screen cracking, so future RAM / harddrive upgrades would be tricky.

 

They do make for a nice, compact device with a reasonable screen size and relativly few extra cables to be tinkered with in a classroom setting. I think I prefer the external power brick - we generally mount them under the teacher's desk in an Ikea cable tray, cable-tied it, and that does make them replaceable if there's a power issue.

 

For those (admin) staff wanting a larger screen we tend to get Mini PCs and velcro them to the underside of a monitor stood on the desk. With suitible short cables and enough cables ties / wrap the cables can be quite neatly done, and you do tend to get a more powerful machine / larger screen for your money, although they aren't really tamper-proof for the classroom.

 

For our ICT lab, we have iMacs. Nice hardware, no excess cables, although they do now also have an external power brick. Oddly, the wired network connection goes into that power brick, which seems a bit odd at first but I guess does make the whole thing a bit more tamper-proof. More expnsive than most all-in-ones, but we figure we should get a solid 7 years usage out of them, so in cost-per-year terms they aren't too bad.

[flipthebit]

5 hours ago, robintech said:

 

One of the reasons I got the Dell AIOs was the kettle lead, not sure if its rational but i can't stand power bricks. Even had a Juniper  SRX320 that our ISP supplied for 4g backup that came with a  massive power brick for some reason and sometimes monitors catch me out.

It's a little less neat, but might make some power supply issues, if they occur, easier to fix long term?

[robintech]

22 minutes ago, flipthebit said:

It's a little less neat, but might make some power supply issues, if they occur, easier to fix long term?

 

I suppose it could but it all seems messy to me and annoying when moving computers around instead of leaving the kettle leads in place, something about them I hate.

Not had any internal PSU fail so far (or before the computer is decommissioned) I feel the same way about power bricks that I do about laptops that don't have USB-C Charging, the current cheaper Dell laptops don't have it so I won't even consider them.

[sigma]

8 hours ago, Squelch said:

I can remember replacing the insides of a lot of RM One's. The cuts to my fingers were savage.

 

They were truely awful, really expensive and poorly spec'd and so hard to work on without gettig cut. The experience with these put me off AIO's for ever.

[dhicks]

1 hour ago, robintech said:

Not had any internal PSU fail so far (or before the computer is decommissioned)

 

Good point - I don't think we've had any devices fail that turned out to be just the power supply, if a machine goes these days the problem generally seems to be something whole-motherboard related.

 

A couple of (minor) niggles we've found with all-in-ones:

 

The built-in / pop-up webcams are snazzy, but confuse teachers easily. Even ones with built-in privacy screens that you can pull accross with a little tab on the top of the camera cause confusion, we have a couple of all-in-ones with a big, chuncky USB webcam sat on top as staff can more easily see and understand those. Built-ins are probably more tamper-proof if you're in a classroom, though.

 

Modern all-in-ones, for some reason, tend not to have USB ports on the front, and can be a bit light on USB ports on the back, too. We find we have to lead at least one short USB extension cable round to the front for people to plug in their USB 2FA dongles. Might be less of an issue if you don't use USB devices for 2FA. In some cases we've had to add a small USB hub at the back to accomodate more ports.

 

Most all-in-ones have HDMI (or maybe USB-C) output ports, so you can add a second monitor (or classroom touch screen), but only a few rare all-in-ones have HDMI /input/ ports. Unless the manufacturers are very well organised, you can't generally get a second monitor that exactly matches the all-in-one screen, so for our (limited) two monitor setups we tend to go with mini PCs with two matching monitors.

[Arthur]

On 05/11/2025 at 15:13, Andycat said:

Be aware, a lot now use a big power brick. We got caught out when the 2 Dells attached, bought a year apart, went from internal Kettle lead to brick. Since then we've moved to Stone, also attached, as they won the framework bid, and were one of only 2 replies that had inbuilt PSU.

 

The external power bricks are annoying, but it's easy to avoid them by buying the Dell AIOs with 65w CPUs instead of 35w. i.e. the Intel processors that don't end with a 'T'.

 

As shown in the attached images the QC24251 has a DC jack and the QC24250 has a standard IEC C14 socket. It was a similar story with the OptiPlex 7410 AIOs too. They came in 35w and 65w variants.

 

 

Edited November 6, 2025 by Arthur

[djm968]

Another option is a Dell Micro mounted to one of these, it offers a bit more flexibility with monitors etc.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-pro-micro-all-in-one-stand-mfs22/apd/482-bbeo/pc-accessories

[6Foot3]

2 minutes ago, djm968 said:

Another option is a Dell Micro mounted to one of these, it offers a bit more flexibility with monitors etc.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-pro-micro-all-in-one-stand-mfs22/apd/482-bbeo/pc-accessories

I don't think this is a good option.

 

You have to buy a monitor unless you're reusing old ones, buy a Micro and the Dell stand.

 

So £99 for the stand £100 for the monitor and £350 to £450 for the micro, depending on spec.

 

You may as well get the aio for that price.

and get the extra benefit of the sound bar and built in webcam.

 

 

[skywalkergr]

Why not have a laptop, and if you need bigger screens, with an external screen setup?