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Ok thanks, It is nice to have someone like you to help with stuff like this Thank you so much for all you do with the site and the amount of great information you share

Alex Trebek, "Little black boxes maybe 4-5 in square and an inch thick." Me, "What is, apple tv?!" Damn. For reals though, it's exactly what your title says, "little black box that replaces my tower" --- it IS the tower, just smaller. I'd only refer to this as a node if the computer itself isn't doing the processing. Then it would basically be just a medium for i/o (input/output... keyboard, mouse, monitor, usb). Your company may be doing it like that but more likely your computer is still running the software physically. A notable example of this type of computer is the Intel Nuc They can be spec'd as low as $250 (with a Celeron J4005 - 2 threads) and go all the way up to north of $1600 with (a Xeon E-2286M - 16 threads!) -- you can also get kits that have no memory and drive for like $135. -- can make for some pretty dense computing. There are all kinds of mini PCs like this. Search Amazon for "mini PC" and watch some youtube reviews to find a good one at a good price. It's ever changing. In 2015 I may have said that this could replace your tower with something like this for lighter workloads like general browsing. Today... you can get a lot done in a much smaller package. Having said that, if you spec'd a full tower at the same price you'd have WAY more power. ...can't really fit an RTX in one of these. -- also I feel it's a huge waste of a processor if you aren't going to take advantage it's extra PCIe lanes. But there's something to be said for such a nice form factor. There are many use cases where this is a much better solution.

It's quite possible the connection is intermittently dropping during the show. This will not show up in a speed test unless you happen to test the moment this happens. However, you can test for this with a continuous ping test while watching a show. If you have a laptop, bring up a command prompt (right-click the Start menu and select either "Command Prompt" or "Windows PowerShell"). Type the following command and press enter: ping -t 8.8.8.8 Ideally this should run on the same Wi-Fi network as what your Netflix is streaming on, unless you are streaming on a wired network connection (e.g. network cable plugged into the TV). When the show starts buffering, have look at the ping responses on the laptop. If it shows multiple "Request timed out" messages, this indicates a dropped connection. If it's still showing replies, but the "time=" value spikes, this indicates network congestion at the time, such as either something hogging the network, Wi-Fi interference or a link issue between your modem and your Internet provider. The next test you can try is check whether the issue is with the Wi-Fi or your ISP by pinging the gateway IP. To find this out, type in the following command: ipconfig Look for the line "Default Gateway" and then type in ping -t followed by the gateway IP address. E.g. if it's 192.168.1.1, type in ping -t 192.168.1.1 Continue watching until you see it buffering again. If the ping replies gave the same symptom as above, e.g. timeout or "time=" value spikes, the issue is with the Wi-Fi connection, such as interference. Otherwise the issue is likely with your Internet provider's link.