Here’s how Lenovo, the manufacturer of this refurbished desktop, describes the system: “The ThinkCentre M51 provides industry-leading manageability for rapid system deployment and remote systems management.”  I don’t know about you, but I think that sounds pretty impressive.  This truly is a powerhouse of a computer, with a 3.2GHz Pentium processor (with Hyper-Threading Technology), a 1MB L2 cache, and 512MB of RAM (expandable to 4GB).  The 7200 RPM Serial ATA hard drive can store 40GB, and you’ll get standard add-ons like a CD-ROM drive, a floppy disk drive (really!), and lots of room to build-on.  There are two PCI slots, two PCI Express slots, a free 3.5″ bay and a free 5.25″ bay.  If you consider this unit as a starting point, you’ve got lots of possibilities for adding on things like DVD-RW drives and upgraded video or audio cards in the future.

An ethernet port is built into the motherboard, and the Intel graphics cards uses shared system memory but will support resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536.  The audio is supplied by SoundMax Cadenza and there’s a built-in speaker.  There’s no mention of USB ports, but I can’t imagine any computer with a 3.2 GHz processor not having a few USB ports.  You may want to confirm this before you order, although the available internal slots mean that USB could be added down the road.

To be realistic, this isn’t a great budget computer for the average home user unless you don’t mind tweaking and upgrading a bit.  It’s a workhorse but it doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles like the average consumer might look for.  For example, the hard drive is sort of small, and there’s no DVD drive at all… not even a CD-RW drive.  The graphics and audio cards are suited for business and not gaming.  However, if you’re a business user, this might be just what you’re looking for.  It has the elusive floppy drive so you can still access old data files, and there’s room to add a backup drive.  It comes with LAN EN, Fast EN, and Gigabit EN.  It also comes pre-installed with Windows XP Professional, whereas almost all other systems ship with the Windows XP Home OS.

The refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre M51 is priced at $420.19 at SaveAtEagle.  This may not be the perfect system for everyone, but it’s going to be the perfect system for someone.  Don’t forget that this price does not include a monitor, but you do get a keyboard and scroll mouse. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 6:01 am and is filed under cheap refurbished desktops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.