Your suggestion on Lenovo Q190

[se224141]

The specs of this desktop system is as follows:

Intel CoreTM i3-32 1 7U, RAM 4GB, hard disk 1 TB, Intel HD Graphics 3000, Win 8.1"

Can this work as a good media center? I heavily stream videos from youtube and other sites.

How do you rate its performance for running MS office applications?

[Para-Noid]

You will be fine. 

The one thing that's in your favor is the RAM.
If you can afford to get more than 4 GB the better your machine will perform.
But 4 GB will do fine. FYI, I have 6 GB on a 8MBs connection and the slower connection
means I have a lot of videos buffering. As far as MS Office goes it should work. I have
both Kingsoft Office Suite Free and Libre Office and they work fine for me. But I don't
do any power point presentations. Hope this helps.

[CraigB]

Personally I wouldn't go below a mid to high end I5... I3's have no cpu power and are more equivalent to a core2duo, what you've also listed is a 32bit which leaves no room to upgrade ram at a later date if needed.

[DavidR]

Considering that you are going to use this as a media center, the onboard Intel GPU chip (HD Graphics 3000) of the i3 CPU is cr4p, this is an older generation i3 CPU. So you would probably need a Graphics card, or a later Intel i3 or i5 CPU with HD Graphics 4000.

Even my old acer netbook with an intel atom dual core has HD Graphics 3150 incorporated in the CPU chip.