These ThinkCentre M73 Tiny boxes are neat little machines. I picked one up to do some home/office server duties. I’m going to record some of my observations here just in case anyone is shopping and looking at these.
From looking at Lenovo’s product reference databases, it doesn’t look like 240GB was a factory disk size. I imagine these SSDs were installed by the refurbisher. It seems to do the job and the machine boots both Windows 10 and Linux pretty quickly.
It is still possible to get most of the factory software/drivers from Lenovo, but be advised that these are slightly old machines, so you may find that a few of the drivers aren’t quite what Windows 10 wants, either in terms of signing or 64-bit cleanliness. For the most part, this doesn’t matter, as the native Windows 10 drivers will pretty much do the job. The refurbisher appears to be legit (I checked a little) and the machine will come with a digital license for Windows 10 that will tie itself to your Microsoft account. (I don’t mean that it will be portable across machines, just that a record of it will show up in the MS account that you use.)
The refurbisher did not include a Windows 10 product key, but that doesn’t appear terribly unusual in light of OEM licensing changes that MS has been doing. It did activate just fine.
The refurbisher is including a WI-Fi dongle. My understanding is that the WLAN components in these were somewhat obscure and not exactly driver friendly to Windows even when they were new, so this is a thoughtful addition. I haven’t used it (mine’s plugged into Ethernet).
Security weenies (like me): Note that there doesn’t appear to be a trusted platform module (TPM) in these. If you want your Bitlocker keys stored in hardware, this might not be the box for you.
You can set the fan to cooling priority, quiet priority, or full speed. Most of the time the thing is pretty much silent. I haven’t profiled temperatures too much yet, but it moves air when it needs to.
Installing both Windows 10 (resident) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9 were pretty trivial operations. It does have a modern UEFI loader so it can do “Secure Boot” with both of those OSes.
There appears to be a very quiet speaker inside the thing, which I can hear even when I tell it to route audio to my monitor via DisplayPort. That’s actually useful, because I don’t have speakers on the monitor in question, so if I crank it up ALL of the way, I can barely hear actual audio from it. I’m hoping that it’s not the result of microphonics in something else.
Be warned: there is an incompatibility with some Intel graphics driver module and some of the Windows 10 security features in more recent builds. If you want the memory integrity enforcement (under “Core Isolation”), this particular module will prevent that from functioning. A lot of the other stuff like Secure Boot works fine though.
If you’re hardcore about security patches like me, expect to probably be disappointed for things like super-current Intel Management Engine updates. I think the most recent one for Windows 10 I found for this processor generation was from 2018 or 2019. That’s still pretty good, considering when these were new, but I don’t expect those updates to become any more frequent.
There are still lots of bases/stands for these available on auction sites. Lenovo made a number of pretty interesting mounting brackets for them, including one with VESA pitch holes that will basically turn a monitor and one of these into an “all in one” desktop machine. I haven’t looked for those online but little freestanding bases seem available.
For people doing things like home lab builds, if the age of the gear isn’t an issue, these are tiny and quiet machines. I have a rack with servers in the basement, but the sound makes my ears bleed. I think I can get a lot of work out of this little machine without ever having to power the big servers on. (Plus a certain vendor that starts with H and ends with P decided to put things like security and firmware updates behind a paywall, so I don’t recommend those for home lab builders anymore. Lenovo on the other hand makes it fairly easy to download almost every single piece of code or driver with which a machine originally shipped.)
I hope those observations help if anyone is considering these. If I were going to do it again, I might get something with a relatively more modern generation of the CPU and chipset and a TPM, but I don’t regret buying the M73 Tiny so far.