HIGOLEPC Mini PC Windows 11 PRO,Intel Celeron J4125 Mini Computer,8GB DDR,256GB EMMC,Mini PC with Screen,Micro PC Support 4K HDMI Double Display,WiFi 5.0, BT4.2, Gigabit Ethernet

I’ve had it now for a few weeks — thought I would do a review, which I nomrally don’t do. First off – yes it had a virus in the OS (which I knew when buying) — but reinstalling the OS is not too difficult once you have the file extracted and the instructions. I had to email their support and that turned out GREAT — they walked me thru all the steps and I got it up and running. So yes it does run hot — but thus far I have not had it shutdown on me because of it. The battery lasts longer than I expected as well. I also owned one of the first editions of this device and these new ones are a pretty good upgrade – twice as much memory, faster CPU, better battery life, and the power is now usb type plug which is also an improvement. Anyway the machine boots and runs nicely — I’m using for multi-media viewing and doing software development on it for my job too lol. Really a quite nice device as its so small and comes with the touchscreen. About the only thing I really wich it had was a couple of cameras — being able to do video chats and take pictures with it is kind of important to a lot of people and cameras are not that expensive so hopefully a future model will have them. To sum it all up — good device with excellent support – glad I bought it & I’ll will get the next-gen model as soon as it somes out.

I wanted something small to run my Spooky2 Rife generators so I could unhitch from my regular PC. It does the job! I love all the usb and other ports — more than my laptop 🙂 I had trouble with the touchscreen, it is so small. I was looking for a stylus, but it seems the hard ones won’t work and the one on the end of my pen was worse than just using my finger. I set up for voice command and this was an improvement. To the rescue — cute Logitech POP Bluetooth mouse. Yellow! Who knew? So I purchased a yellow case for it. The mouse is the answer. No wondering about what goes with what 🙂 It does run hot, so to protect it, I have ordered a fan for it to sit on.

What a half-baked attempt. It does technically work like you see in their videos. Otherwise it’s been very frustrating and actually hazardous to use.

This device and it’s charger skip the USB PD protocol, even though the trigger chips cost almost nothing. It always outputs 12v. If you plug in any other USB C device, it will probably break, and if it’s also not of good quality could cause a fire hazard. The computer will not work with other chargers, even those that support USB PD at 12v because the circuitry to request that voltage does not exist inside, even though again, they are tiny and cheap to implement. There’s no excuse for this negligent design.
Also the charger is bigger than the device and you’re stuck with it. Really not a good look.

Continuing the trend… it gets very hot. During setup of windows it was not burning, but uncomfortable to hold.
The metal is sharp at the corners, if I hold it tight with sweaty or just washed, soft hands I could easily cut myself.
Another issue I have is with the supposed warranty void sticker which are actually illegal in my country. Taking apart my property which I paid for is allowed and does not void warranties. Even if it were legal, it’s paper and mounted over the (sharp) edge of the back and side, so it will definitely just scrape off going into my pocket. it’s also a bad translation, saying “not valid if ripped apart”. What a joke.

Overall to me it seems like they had some old stock and spare parts laying around, and are trying to sell them off at a profit.
Metal shell is the same as a less powerful device that they sold on other sites a few years ago, you can find it by searching their various names online.

I’d wait for another version, stay away from this one!

(tl;dr at bottom)

Primarily, this is running on the J1425 processor on resource-hungry Win11, so it’s gonna be an old, slow dog with the initial updates and after that, still don’t expect a lot of speed. This sucker also got HOT HOT HOT running all the updates and I think it started to thermally throttle when it was updating because it took a couple hours to get the whole OS updated. It never shut off though so I’m guessing the throttling is to keep that from happening with this newer edition. The unit cooled down pretty quickly after going back to idling. The touch screen can be pretty finicky as I’m just using the default display size.

This unit still uses the 12v USB-C connector for power. Be sure to mark your power adapter so you don’t accidently fry any of your other dumb USC-C devices.

A lot of people are interested in installing linux on the metal/dual-booting, and I’m personally adverse to that. It appears with lack of driver support, some distros have it good (Ubuntu) while others seem to be suffering (Debian.) Virtual boxes seem to be the go-to from the looks of it.

I had to manually install the Microsoft 2019C++ Redistributable 32bit package before I could get VirtualBox running, but I just threw the GUI Kali 32bit (x64) iso in it and it works, shockingly enough! Before you can get things running, you need an external keyboard since you can’t interact with the CLI/GUI without one first, the touchscreen doesn’t pull up the keyboard. After the installation, I found out that the Wifi is fine out of the box, the default display ratio sucks, and the CLI is a PitA to work with and sluggish since the J1425 is an oldie now.

I had to modify a fair amount of the settings to make this functional as a portable Kali machine. My settings are:

DISPLAY:
-800×600 4:3 resolution 1.3x scale

This helps keep the Kali display stay in the entire window. The native display default (1200×800) is too much and requires scrolling through the entire display to see everything. A major nuisance. The 800×600 also allows the virtual keyboard to stay within the display too since if you dock the virtual keyboard to the bottom of the screen, you won’t see it in the default 1200×800 displaying, and if you dock the keyboard to the top, it’ll cover your CLI. My pic has the best setup I’ve found so far

ONBOARD SETTINGS (keyboard):
-General tab:
— ✅ Auto-show when editing text
-Window tab:
— ✅ Dock to screen edge (bottom)
-Layout tab:
–Small

These are the baseline settings I applied for the virtual keyboard. It’s been working well as can be seen in the attached photos.

ravs.b trojan (virus)

This is an oldschool hash from 2011 that changes a few registries, the winlogon and the Windows File Protection (WFP). Trojans use this to obfuscate any changes to critical windows files by changing the SFDisable flag to “2” so Windows won’t pick it up.

Now, I’m *guessing* that this is a false positive because people do go into these registries and change the SFCDisable so custom drivers can be loaded up for whatever lower kernel access people want or need. The Gole1 Pro has the flag set to “4” and uses a custom driver to have the keyboard automatically pop up which is why you see the “Core isolation” as off in Windows Defender (see pic.) If you turn this on, the keyboard no longer pops up because the popup is now disabled. It’s janky code to get a custom driver working for the Gole1 Pro, but I can see why that is the case. This is also why you won’t see the keyboard popup in a virtualbox/dualboot environment.

HIGOLE:
Guys, if you can make your pocket PC with the option to have a loaded Ubuntu/Kali/Debian operating system, these things will sell like hotcakes. Please consider this since you did look at all of the suggestions for the older GOLE1 Pro and fixed them 🙏

Final thoughts/tl;dr:

It’s a neat object but it’s not a powerhouse. Linux is spotty but you can make it work. I doubt this will last a long time but I have zero complaints for a pocket Kali Linux running ~250 USD with the coupon.