Your suggestion on Lenovo Q190

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?

You will be fine. 8)

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.

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.

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.