Customer Reviews

IBM ThinkCentre M50 8187 Desktop PC - REFURBISHED

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I purchased this pc from DATA SALES, and I am very pleased with it. I upgraded from an older, slower pc (Pentium 3: 500 mhz, 512 mb ram, Windows XP Pro) to this IBM (Pentium 4: 3 ghz, 1 gb ram, Windows XP Pro) and, as can be imagined, the difference is incredible. The pc came with 512 mb ram instead of the advertised 1 gb, but Data Sales promptly shipped me the rest and even gave me a free upgrade (to 1.5 gb). I cannot speak to the issue of drivers, as noted by another reviewer, since after hosing the hard drive (via imaging my old hard drive) I wound up installing Windows XP Pro from scratch (which was probably the best thing to do, anyway). Again, I am very pleased with this pc and with Data Sales.

I used a pair of these as low-load servers for a couple of years. They ran 24/7 and were totally reliable the whole time. If you want to add a second hard drive, you can fit one in the floppy bay, or mount it in the second optical drive bay with an adapter bracket. There are two SATA ports on the motherboard, which most sale sites don't mention. The case design is robust, the easiest to service that I have ever seen. They have gigabit ethernet on the motherboard, kind of unusual for a machine this age. They're quite Linux-friendly, too.

However... This model is seven years old now and the technology is pretty dated. The SATA ports are SATA I, as far as I could tell. I mentioned earlier you could add a second hard drive, and you can, but you're pushing the limits on the tiny 230W power supply if you do. And you're never going to run any modern Windows version on a 3GHz Pentium 4. Plus, when I took them out of service I discovered some of the capacitors on the motherboard are starting to deteriorate.

Nice sturdy machine for its time, and if your performance requirements are modest you could do a lot worse. But inspect the motherboard for bulging capacitors if you buy one.

bought one of these for my daughter for Christmas. What a disappointment! Drivers were missing, and when we went to the suggested website to get them, all we got were trojan viruses! What a disappointed kid I have on my hands.