ThinkCentre M75n is a Different Tiny PC

Read Time: 6 minute(s)

I picked up a small device — one I’ve not seen before — on eBay for $99.99, the Lenovo ThinkCentre M75n AMD Ryzen 3 Pro 3300U 2.1 GHz 8GB 256GB NVMe WINPRO11.

With 8 GB of RAM and 356 GB of storage (that is an odd number…more on this in a moment) this computer could be a strong platform for a radio-over-internet node of some kind.

But it had some problems

It turns out this device had problems. Specifically, Windows 11 Pro was not working right and I couldn’t fix it!

The AMD Ryzen 3 seemed plenty strong enough to run Windows 11 Pro, but something about W11P was not right. When I booted it up the first time, I saw the desktop of the previous owner. S/he had left a bunch of personal apps installed and available, i.e., the computer wasn’t scrubbed before it was shipped.

That’s never a good sign. I immediately initiated a “reset my PC” routine and instructed the device to download a fresh W11 instance from the cloud. After about six hours beating my head on the table, I finally threw in the towel. I was unable to reinstall a clean instance of Windows. The machine wouldn’t accept it. That was very odd.

I opened a partition manager and was surprised that the two NVMe drives in the machine were both configured as boot drives for Windows. There were strange-looking partitions, too. The whole thing made me uncomfortable so I chose to repartition and format both drives.

I was hoping to use this as a W11P machine, but the fallback was to install trusted-and-true Debian 13.

Installed Debian 13

I did install Debian 13 and it went well:

You can tell I’ve changed some things:

• Selected an alternate Debian 13 desktop background
• Moved the app tray from the bottom to the side
• I installed screenfetch so I see machine details whenever I open the terminal.

What you don’t see is the machine is set to allow desktop sharing using the krfb application. One of the tricky things about krfb is it changes the password each time it runs. That’s a good security measure. It’s intended to be used when you wish to temporarily give access to your desktop for, say, a troubleshooting session. However, I needed to find a way to make the remote access password unchanging so it would persist when the machine is rebooted. Once I figured this out, it has worked brilliantly for my use case (local access only).

I reach this headless (no monitor) machine from my Windows laptop via the RealVNC Viewer program. Also, I find using a VNC connection works best for me with a dummy plug in the DisplayPort monitor port. Without the dummy plug, the machine thinks there is no display so it doesn’t know what to show a remote connection. With the dummy plug, it works fine.

When I installed Debian, I told it to put everything on one partition. Later, I thought it might have been smarter to use the other drive as my /home drive. Instead, I set that second drive up as a data-only drive. I’m using it as a target for backups of the primary drive.

Surprise: Two storage spaces

Surprisingly, the M75n Nano has not one but two M.2 slots. Windows said it had a total of 356 GB of storage. That is an odd number, even with two drives. One drive had a 256 GB capacity and the other 128 GB. The 28 GB gap between adding those up and the stated capacity seemed excessive to me. I thought I’d better look at the drives to confirm their capacity before doing much more.

I also wanted to confirm the specs of the installed NVMe drives and that meant I had to figure out how to remove the base plate. I wasn’t quite sure how to open the bottom of the case until I found this video from ServeTheHome:

You unscrew the single screw on the base, then slide the bottom plate about 1/8” from back to front, then lift off the plate:

Inside, there are spaces for two M.2 drives and a wireless card:

Yes: two drives, one 256 GB and the other 128 GB.

Can I run a VM on this?

I wondered: can I run a virtual machine on this? Why yes, yes I can!

This machine has just enough “juice” to run a virtualized machine. Unfortunately, the 8 GB of DDR4 RAM is soldered to the motherboard so adding more RAM is not an available option.

I’d like to try putting the Ampersand-ASL Server package on a VM and then see if I can still access audio. To get started on this path, I installed virt-manager for handling virtual machines.

Below, I have Debian 13 with the XFCE desktop environment running in a QEMU/KVM instance on top of my Debian 13 base system. To be clear: I have a Debian 13 VM running on a Debian 13 host.

You can tell the VM is pushing the machine a bit by the amount of RAM consumed, as shown in the status display to the right of the host machine screen. The normal amount of RAM consumed when the VM is not running is 1.3 gigabytes. With virt-manager running, the computer consumes 1.6 GB. Once I start the VM within virt-manager, RAM consumption jumps to 2.6 GB.

Conky for more operating information

What is that nice-looking panel on the right side of the screen? That is Conky. It gives me a nice status panel docked to the right side of the screen. I changed the desktop background to a darker theme to make it easier to see the Conky data. The image above is a screenshot of the RealVNC Viewer window accessed via my Windows 11 laptop. (Let me know if you’d like a copy of my conky.conf file.)

For now, this is an experimental machine. It takes up very little space. The computer is heavy enough that with the rubbery feet on the bottom, it doesn’t move around on the shelf.

If you find one with 4 GB or 8 GB of RAM at a very good price, it would make a great platform for a radio-less AllStar node.