Okay, I answered my last question. I was thinking of the Intel NUC. Has anyone played with one of those?
I have recently bought a NUC D54250WYKH with win8.1 to replace my girlfriends old winXP machine. 8GB RAM, 120GB mSATA HD.
Nice looking little box, seems fast enough for her needs (MS office, web browsing, emails, Google Earth mainly), can be VESA mounted (assuming the monitor's stand does not take up the mount already), dead silent, runs cool (although nothing she does is stressing it). Four USB 3.0 ports (more would always be nice!). I feel it would look cleaner if all the ports were at the rear but not a big deal, especially if VESA mounted.
Pity about the win8.1 POS UI (fixed by Classic Shell)! Actually, once you do that, win8.1 is not too bad. Fast to boot up and shut down, quite snappy response in use and much like win7. Also, all of the older programs from XP that we needed will still work despite the upgrade advisor (or whatever it is called) deeming them incompatible.