Another tiny PC added to the mini server rack

I was holding out for another Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 tiny PC with an i7 CPU but those have become scarce. I did find one with Windows 11 Pro and a 256 Gb SSD. It came with two 8 Gb sticks of RAM. The price was fair so I hit the Buy It Now button.

Once it arrived, I swapped in two 16 Gb sticks of RAM. While I had the cover off, I also managed to pop one of the wifi leads off the wifi card. This is a tiny little connection. It took some bright light to illuminate the area, a pair of tweezers, and a plastic tool to get the wire snapped back onto the card.

I also used some cleaning tools to gently loosen bits of dust, then some compressed air to clear out the debris. The PC was pretty clean so there wasn’t much I needed to do. I did brush out all the external ports and blew those clean, too.

Then it was time to boot it up and see if the i7 chip was fast enough to adequately run Windows 11 Pro. Except what booted up was Windows 11 Home, not Pro. Darn it. This is not a deal breaker but it is disappointing, since I prefer to use RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) over a Tailscale connection, but Windows 11 Home doesn’t allow RDP to run. Since this machine will be pretty much limited to my local network, I can use some flavor of VNC. (Update: I’m using Remote Ripple to access the machine, and installed TightVNC Server on it to allow VNC connections.)

It took nearly an hour for the PC to finish installing missing updates and rebooting. The good news is the machine did boot up cleanly and it did properly detect the 32 Gb of RAM I had installed. Win.

The seller also refunded some money to me after I let him know the machine wasn’t exactly what was advertised. That was a nice gesture and I appreciate it.

Here’s the machine (the topmost Lenovo ThinkCentre machine) in the (messy) mini server rack:

Now I need to decide whether to upgrade the OS to Win 11 Pro or simply replace Win 11 Home with a flavor of Linux. I’ll let it run for a few weeks to make sure it is stable before I make that decision. If I replace the OS, I could take that opportunity to replace the 256 Gb of storage with a larger capacity SSD.

For now, I’m using this machine to archive my old emails…that go back to 2005. That’s 20 years of email history. Wow. I do know I’m going to add storage to this device, probably a 1 Tb NVME SSD drive. It looks like it takes an M.2 2280 size drive.