I did find time this week to work on a couple of Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PCs. That didn’t go so well. One appears to be bricked. It ran fine for a few days and then wouldn’t boot. I’m attempting to reset the BIOS so I can try to start over with it but right now it is not sending anything to the monitor.
The other was an older ThinkCentre M625q machine with a very limited AMD CPU. I had more success with this computer but it has some inherent limitations. The eBay description of the device was: Lenovo ThinkCentre M625q Tiny PC E2-9000e 16GB 256GB SSD Win11 Pro
The M625q was first manufactured around 2018-2019, based on the CPU it uses. The AMD E2-9000e CPU is a 64-bit processor with only two cores, and a clock speed of 1.5 GHz with bursts to 2.0 GHz. In 2018, the primary Windows version was Windows 10. I suppose it may have run Win10 acceptably.
This unit came with Windows 11 Pro installed, but I immediately noticed how incredibly slow (and warm — more on this in a moment) the machine was running. And, it turned out, Windows wasn’t activated. When I went to activate it, Microsoft declined to do so. Rather than try to fix this issue (because even if fixed, the machine would still be very slow), I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 7 “Gigi”) on it. It runs reasonably well, even with the older AMD chip holding it back.
The device has two DB9 serial ports on the back and USB 1.0 ports, again proving it’s an older computer. (But this also means this could be a god choice to use with an older amateur radio or accessory that has a DB9 serial port.) When I opened it up, I was surprised to find it was fanless, with a huge heat sink on top of the CPU. The machine was running warm so I pulled the heat sink off to find a very small AMD CPU and the thermal paste completely dried out.
In the photo below, I’ve cleaned off the old thermal paste (you can tell because the CPU is shiny) but had not yet cleaned the old stuff from the pins around the CPU.
Like I said, it’s a huge heatsink:
I couldn’t put my hands on my tube of thermal paste so after cleaning the CPU and heat sink with alcohol and Q-Tips, I cut a piece of thermal tape and applied that. Follow-up testing showed better thermal control, so I’m guessing this is going to work well enough.
Underneath the bottom case cover is an M.2 space and a single memory bank.
I would say this purchase was a mistake. However, I’ll find something useful for it to do. Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is running fine on it. I have xrdp installed and am able to manage the device over RDP from my Windows laptop. It’s got plenty of juice to run as an AllStar node, so that may be it’s ultimate destiny.
I’m pleased to be able to repurpose an older computer that may have plenty of useful life left in it.
Leave a Reply