Lenovo ThinkPad Mini 10: The Worst ThinkPad Ever Made

This is a video on a ThinkPad laptop that I believe to be the worst one to ever come out of Lenovo. It's cheap, underpowered, slow, and was only sold in Australia for the education market about ten years ago. It's the Lenovo ThinkPad Mini 10 - a lower-end version of an already low-end product, the ThinkPad X100e. But I believe it's interesting and weird enough to showcase in a video because even subpar products can still be cool.
I filmed this video back in February 2020 but did not get around to editing it until now, my apologies if any information in the video is out-of-date.
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Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video and let me know what you thought of it.
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Outro Music Credit: The Process by Lakey Inspired - you can listen to it here: • LAKEY INSPIRED - The P...

[@germaineliew2012]

Who the heck looked at that and thought it was a good idea? The screen bezels are thick as fuck, the Mini 10 makes any early to mid 2000's laptop look like the displays of a modern day smartphone.

[@vwestlife]

As terrible as this model is, it's mostly Microsoft who is to blame for it, not Lenovo. During the netbook era, Microsoft placed restrictions on the hardware specifications of "ultra-low-cost PCs" eligible for lower-cost OEM licensing of Windows XP Home Edition and Windows 7 Starter Edition. In order to get this discount, machines could not exceed a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1 GB of RAM expandable to 2 GB, and a maximum screen size of around 12 inches. Maybe Lenovo shouldn't have called such a restricted machine a ThinkPad in the first place, but in order to get that discount from Microsoft, they weren't allowed to give it a larger, higher-resolution LCD even if they wanted to. Microsoft has continued to have similar restrictions on low-end Windows 10 licenses, which led to a whole slew of more recent laptops limited to a 12" display, 2 GB of RAM, and a 32 GB eMMC flash drive.

[@und4287]

32gb of RAM is plenty, but 32gb of storage is uselessly small.

[@ninkeon58]

Hi, fellow high school student here. We had these as well, these were absolute crap when they were new, running Windows 7 on the stock 1GB of RAM and 160GB HDD was not fun. Having still own mine from new, and now an X100e, I can confirm the chassis is almost identical to the x100e. The key benefit to these running the Atom CPU was when new, you could get over 6 hours out of these things, compared to maybe 3 at best on the x100e, and may have been the reason why Lenovo chose to use it rather than the AMD MV-40 CPU, which was hot and often just as slow as the Atom. At the time, dropping 2GB of RAM (which is the max these will accept thanks to the Pineview chipset) into them made them into somewhat capable machines, especially if Windows XP was ran instead of 7. I used mine until 2014 when I retired it for a cheap ex-lease T420 from ebay. A nice touch for these netbooks was that the screen was native 720p, instead of the common 1024x600 from the timeperiod. The only parts that are unique to the Mini 10 is the screen and screen assembly, and the heatsink, these are apart from the obvious motherboard differences (including the CPU and chipset). And yes, there was many colour variations of these machines, as you covered in the video, including a blue model. However, from what I can gather, only the standard black models had the unlocked BIOS on them. The others were locked, and supposedly had Lojack enabled on the machines.

[@eletronictoenails]

At school, I had this laptop, the other kids had the T400. to give an idea of how much of a gap there is, the T400 could run Half-Life 2 on low settings at 1440x900 at a good framerate, the Mini 10 struggled to play flash games on Cool Math Games

[@Protog3n_pd2]

Have laptop with almost same specs, already got used to freezes in Minecraft

[@PantusiaGaming]

A Kiddy Version Of ThinkPad!?!

[@mat-mat101]

This laptop: Hey, we have the thinkpad at home.

[@munnsie100]

I remember a handful of blue versions being around my NSW public high school around 2014-2019. I was issued a red X131e, which was much better in comparison, but still about as slow as molasses. Still, it did the job for general word processing and browsing sites for research and was a great help during my high school years. I recall a mention of tracking software and potential remote access to the microphone and webcam, including logs of login/logouts, and location data. The bottom case/access panel is stamped (on the X131e) with words mentioning NSW Police and some sort of tracking device. Interesting.

[@maisiefreeman8597]

Still got my primary school Mini 10 in my desk drawer. I used it for about 6 months after I started high school, when I got a newer school-supplied netbook. Used it again when I left high school and had to surrender my school-supplied netbook until I acquired my own full-size laptop, which I have had for six years now. The Mini 10 honestly survived the best out of the four school-supplied netbooks I had over the years, by a good margin too. I replaced XP with Xubuntu and that dramatically improved the performance. I will be recommissioning the Mini 10 as a laptop to take to University, as I am finally going back to in-person classes after a long illness and do not want to carry around my workhorse laptop all day. I will be looking into upping the RAM to 2gb and perhaps some other modifications besides.

[@grahamr6545]

i want it because its crappy.. :P

[@JackStavris]

I like your way of thinking.

[@MixShadowlight]

I personally find emmc "SSD" commonly used on newer laptops of this size even more unbearable than mechanical drives. Especially when they start to wear down from daily usage.

[@jlu]

I used these in primary school (netbooks anyone?), the main features I remember about them was their keyboards were pretty good and long live the TrackPoint :)

[@karl-erikkald8876]

Dem bezels man...

[@ajitkumarsinha1992]

Hey Jack! I could definitely use a little advice. Classic, old thinkpads are hard to comeby, especially where I live, I've waited quite a while for a T60 to pop up somewhere with no luck :/. I've just come across an R60. Should I get the R60 or wait for a T60 to pop up somewhere? Cheers!

[@JackStavris]

They’re mostly the same just the R60 is thicker and probably lower specced. But still worth it since you can upgrade it

[@gloriatibavisco1760]

A complete nightmare ! brand new with issues, costumer service another nightmare.. I waste my money I can't work with this device, it was supposed a robust configuration since I need for my graphic design... lost of money, time and effort.

[@PearComputingDevices]

Brand new 12 years ago.

[@KoenDoesThings]

In my opinion the worst thinkpad I have used is the lenovo thinkpad 11e which is a piece of junk that my high school gave to all the year 7's and 8's in 2022 including me and the are fucking terrible.

[@emmanuelsakala4978]

I have this same one but it's black screen when it's showing that it's running

[@Narukiko]

That is some *T H I C C* bezels

[@JackStavris]

E X T R A T H I C C

[@digitalhermit8928]

I'm still salty about mine. Just a few weeks before graduation I handed mine in to the tech teacher/laptop guy to get it repaired, and I never saw it again

[@JackStavris]

top 10 anime betrayals

[@travelvideos9390]

Shitty netbook and it should be thrown into dustbin

[@Nonje4560]

Do you use that PS2 and OG Xbox

[@lodle2919]

Are you going to be purchasing the Xbox Series X or the PS5 when they come out?

[@JackStavris]

yes for xbox, no for PS5, that will come later on after launch

[@islamhe7466]

what is the full specification cpu and the cpu core ram ram speed gpu and the vram

[@jonatan_leandoer96]

Intel core i9 and nvidia gtx 3080

[@LBSiUK]

Oh my goodness you also had a Satellite Pro C850 with a Sandy Bridge i5. I'm still using mine but upgrading soon. Also, who would run Windows 10 on an n450? I put Lubuntu on my Eee PC with the same specs and 720p50 is doable on KZbin.

[@JackStavris]

I never had a Satellite Pro C850.

[@LBSiUK]

@@JackStavris Oh. As far as I knew there were two models of Satellite Pro. The C660 which had a C2D and the C850 which had an i5 / i3.

[@JackStavris]

The Satellite Pro nameplate has been around for decades, I have in my collection a Satellite Pro 430CDT from 1997. There's been tones of models to use that name. The laptop I bought back in 2012 was the Satellite Pro L770.

[@LBSiUK]

@@JackStavris Was the L770 actually any good? My C850 is really quite crap in build quality and looks.

[@JackStavris]

It was okay from what I remember. Wasn't the best build quality but I liked the big 17" screen and going from a Core 2 Duo with Intel graphics to a Sandy Bridge i5 and a GT 525M was a big upgrade for me at the time.

[@fahadxt1]

Can anyone tell me by their experience, if this machine can support 4GB of DDR2 ram ?

[@wc2006]

no, the atom cpu only supports 2 gib