Refurbished Mini PCs

What "Tiny" actually means

Lenovo's Tiny chassis is roughly a one-litre box - about the footprint of a hardback book. It is the same machine class Dell sells as OptiPlex Micro and HP sells as EliteDesk/ProDesk Mini. They were built for corporate desk deployments, which is why they are quiet, run on an external power brick, and are designed to be opened and serviced without tools.

That corporate origin is the reason they are worth buying used. These are business machines that were specified for three-to-five year deployments, not consumer hardware built to a price.

Which generation should you buy?

The model number tells you the CPU generation, and the CPU generation decides whether the machine can run Windows 11. Microsoft's supported-processor list starts at 8th generation Intel, which is the single most important dividing line when buying one of these.

If you need Windows 11 with official updates, buy 8th generation or newer. If the machine is going to run Linux, Proxmox or a firewall OS, older generations are still perfectly capable and cost noticeably less.

What you can upgrade

• Memory - two SODIMM slots (laptop-style DDR4 on 6th generation and newer). Most of these ship at 8GB and take considerably more.
• Storage - an M.2 NVMe slot, and on most models room for a 2.5" SATA drive as well, so you can run a fast boot drive plus bulk storage in the same one-litre box.
• Expansion - several models accept a low-profile PCIe card through an official riser kit. That is what makes a network card possible, and it is covered on our firewall appliance page.

Where they make sense

Front-desk and office workstations, digital signage, point-of-sale, a quiet always-on machine in a home office, or the hardware layer of a home lab. They are less suited to heavy sustained workloads or anything needing a discrete GPU - the chassis has no room and the power brick has no headroom.

How we prepare them

Every machine is inspected, tested and configuration-verified before it is listed. Specifications on each listing reflect the actual unit, drives are wiped, and each system ships with a power adapter and a 30-day warranty. Details are on our shipping, returns and warranty page.