Hello, I am embarking on my HA journey. I have a Surface Pro 7 I was hoping to install HA onto while I learn HA before investing in a nice NUC. Is this a viable option? If so, from what I seem to understand, HA overwrites the Windows OS, but if I ever wanted to restore my Surface Pro 7, can I reinstall Windows 11 to it (I already have Win 11 saved to an external hard drive)? Additionally, just for clarification, my Surface Pro 7 does not have an ethernet port. Can this still work for running HA?
Simply- NO!
You can install HAOS on anything that has an x-86 compatible processor, but the Surface is a really bad idea.
Home Assistant is a server and expected to run 24/7. I have a couple of Surface Pro PCs and I can’t imagine them running this long. They tend to get hot after a few hours, and one of them had a battery replacement. It is simply not a 24/7 computer.
You are correct that installing HAOS replaces whatever OS you have on your PC. Since you are new to Home Assistant, please, PLEASE don’t fall for the hype from others who tell you to “just install Proxmox” or some other virtualization program. As Marvin said, “This will all end in tears. I just know it”. Unless you enjoy jumping into the deep end without any prior experience.
HAOS, Bare Metal, installed on a generic x-86 just works. No futzing with memory allowances, port forwarding, etc. It just works.
You can also install HAOS on a Raspberry Pi, and that is where most people start, but the Pi is really under-powered for the serious Home Assistant user. I do recommend a mini-PC. My favorite is the Intel NUC, but Bmax is also good. But you can buy a used Intel NUC for less than the cost of a new Raspberry Pi5, case and power supply. And any mini-PC will outperform the Raspberry Pi in every metric. Except power. If you are the kind who uses a stopwatch to count the pennies when a light is turned on, then maybe you should reconsider using Home Assistant. Once hooked you will find an endless supply of things to add to your Home Assistant rabbit hole and the Raspberry will struggle to keep up.
By the way, I got lucky last week and bought a new Intel NUC8i5 on eBay for $96. I couldn’t pass that one up. But you can easily find NUC’s with i3 processors for under $100. I avoid Celeron processors. Those chips were designed for laptops and using one is similar to the low performance of the Raspberry Pi. But the NUC is designed for 24/7 and make great server hardware. I have one for HAOS, one for Frigate, one for Plex and my NAS (basically a NUC running Ubuntu and share a large SSD using Samba).
Hope this helps.
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Also HAOS does not include driver support for most of MSFT’s custom stuff you may get wierd behaviors in power managent and other things.
I’ve got multiple Surfaces, Surfii? All the way back to my RT doorstop my Go, Laptop Studio (favorite by far) , Pro. (im very glad they were company provided)
Id not load HA on any of them because *points up. Great machine. Not fit for task. Get a Minipc, use the surface for VS Code and Jinja Templates 
If you wish to use your surface for testing HA before spending money on a NUC, I recommend using VirtualBox, VMware or Hyper-V. Refer to Windows - Home Assistant
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This points up
Yes but… Don’t use Hyper-V for this. Pick one the others. Only because HV does not include USB pass through on desktop versions of Windows… So yes test case but not on Hyper V… If USB connection to the HA host matters.
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Okay, good info. I probably should have mentioned I’m not planning on running this 24/7. I’m just using it to play around with it. I’ll boot up the computer and mess around with HA. Soon as I feel like I’m able to do the things I want to do with it I’m going to invest in a quality NUC.
I feel like maybe I should mention my motivation for finally getting into home assistant. I on occasion get vertigo. Presently I’m in nursing school and recently a bout of vertigo left me getting behind on studying for an exam and writing a paper. When I have vertigo my brain works just fine, but I just can’t do anything because everything is spinning. This can last from hours to days to weeks to months (I had it for a month and a half once… that sucked lol). I want to be able to automate certain tasks with home assistance such as being able to do a voice to text (was thinking of using ChatGPT because I really like its results for voice to text) and have that transferred over into a Google doc. That way I could be laying on my couch with vertigo and be able to still write an essay and have my notes and research read back to me when prompted through my Speechify subscription I have (I have tested the chat. GPT voice to text including with adding in-text citations for papers and it worked amazingly, so I know that portion of the function is possible). I realize it’s a bit of work, but it’s something I want to see about making possible through home assistant.
Would my above goal mean a virtual machine might be better for running home assistant? Because I want it to communicate to a computer that displays on my TV. I was initially thinking of having a NUC running a virtual machine for home assistant and then having it relay commands to the computer through something such as event ghost. Or is it something that would require two separate computers if I wanted a powerful home assistant set up? (I want power because I intend to do some AI conversational stuff if possible)
Here is a mini PC that I was looking at… 32GB RAM setup
Others may disagree, but that seems like overkill for the task.
You might consider a Dell Wyze 5070 with Pentium J5005 for about $50 used off eBay with 8 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD, antennas, base, and power brick. A Raspberry Pi 5 with case has probably about twice the processing power and is probably about $100 once you get done with a case, storage, and a power brick.
Edit:
A general-purpose CPU is not what you need to run moderately powerful AI models locally. To do so, you probably want to look at something with a GPU that is supported by the leading Python libraries. My feeling is that you’d do better with a modest PC that takes a graphics card and plan on $300 and up for the card.
@RickyRay - Jeff is correct. As of today, if you are using “AI conversational stuff” to really help you on your day to day in any meaningful way, you could still use a $50 or $100 or $150 mini PC, the internet connection, and then pay subscription fees to OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or Claude.
Or put it differently, if you want to run your own “AI conversational stuff” locally on your own machine without relying on anyone else outside your home, with any useable (not just acceptable) results, then this $550 range hardware would not be enough. You likely will need a 4- or 5-digit USD setup to clear the threshold of being marginally useful.
So, in short, you don’t really need to drop $564 for a i7 metal box - it’s way overkill. But hey, you certainly could if you want to. 