Lenovo M93p Tiny PC

For a lot of my computing life between about 1990 to 2007 I was heavily involved in IBM computers after working for them and with them in the 80s.

My computers here leftover from my businesses are mostly IMB Lenovo, the a small scattering of Compaq and an old Acer 5315 laptop I acquired for one of my yachts.

A few years ago I wanted something affordable with USB 3 ports, so I acquired the Gigabyte Brix, with its quad core Celeron and 4 x USB 3 ports.  For quite a while I've wanted a second small form factor computer to supplement the Brix should anything happen to it.  I looked at the various Intel NUC boxes, but they were all pretty pricey.

This year, while my son was visiting he saw some Lenovo M93p Tiny computers advertised on eBay for a little under $200 including post.  They are all about 4 years old and ex-lease.  We ordered one each.

The Lenovo Tiny is a little under 200mm each side and about 40mm thick.  My M93p has an Intel Haswell  i5-4590T  CPU with a clock speed of 2GHz and Turbo of 3GHz.  There was an option of a 4570T, ut despite being consoderably faster at clock and turbo speeds, it is only 2 cores, and it has a considerably slower GPU.

For my use, especially with lots of video and graphics editing, I thought the 4 cores and faster graphics performance was the best decision.

It came with a 128GB SSD installed, and once it arrived I hooked up the original Brix 500GB SATA HDD through a USB port.  While I was messing around deciding which operating system i was going to use, I discovered GRUB had picked up the old operating systems I'd had on the Brix before I bought the 500GB Crucial SSD for it.

So in between tests of a few Linux operating systems, I could boot the old drive and run lots of my old stuff.  I tried Elementary OS HERA (the latest release) and while it is pretty and fast, I soon realised why I stopped using it.  It is simply too inflexible.

I tried a new one called Peppermint.  It was awful.  After checking out those fast operating systems, and in between, booting into my old Kubuntu and Mint systems with Plasma 15 and 16 on them, I realised how much I like the snappy response of some of the light weight desktops.

One that I had not used in a long time, but I had liked a lot in the old days, was XFCE.  I downloaded Mint 19.2 FCE and booted from a live USB 2 thumb drive.  It was great, so I installed it.  I had forgotten how easy it is to configure.  I soon had it set up almost as nice as Plasma, and even had my video desktop wallpaper (all the shell scripts were on my old HDD).

A bonus is that the 4 core i5 4590T processor is quite fast enough for running 2160p (4k) videos in webm format.  It looks incredible on the $500  Big W -  EKO brand UHD TV.

The Lenovo M93p Tiny has a couple of interesting little tricks.  One is that if you set it up properly, one of the USB 3 ports is specially designed to turn the computer ON using the Keyboard.  Leaving the computer plugged in after shutting down, a simple ALT + p  on the keyboard will turn the computer ON for you.  The correct USB 3 port has a tiny emblem of a keyboard next to it. (The middle USB port next to the VGA port).

There is another neat thing available if you are leaving the computer plugged in.  On the front face, one of the USB ports is Yellow instead of the usual Blue for USB 3.

The Yellow port (on the Right) stays LIVE.  You can plug a Phone or other USB powered device, to charge it.

Lots of these very small computers are available at the moment as they come off lease from big corporate environments,

Display is via one VGA port, and two 'Display Port' sockets.  You need to buy a DPI to HDMI adapter cable to use this computer with HDMI, but they are only a few dollars.

The display on a 55 inch UHD TV is fantastic.