[Piers]

Not talking about that issue, talking about long term hardware, driver and construction. At first I thought the Q180 was a great product (even owned a Q190 for a few weeks before returning it) then I realised that support was highly limited and the way the devices are put together is pretty crap.

I'm a massive fan of IBM/Lenovo - have three Thinkpads and a couple of servers. But after that experience with the Qseries I won't buy more from them.

[locust]

I see.. It's just such the opposite of my experience with the Q190.. I'm not really sure what to say, but mine is doing its job *fingers crossed*

[Piers]

Wait until you have an issue with it (I hope you don't), then you'll start to see why I refuse to touch Lenovo again.

Edit: I should add that it did serve its purpose for around a year, but I expect a ~£200 device to last a little longer than that.

[locust]

Piers - can you elaborate on what kind of things happened with yours?? Just so I can be aware of the issues and look for anything that may be wrong..

[milli]

Wait until you have an issue with it (I hope you don't), then you'll start to see why I refuse to touch Lenovo again.

Edit: I should add that it did serve its purpose for around a year, but I expect a ~£200 device to last a little longer than that.

It would help if you can shed some light on the issues you had.

[aliena]

Hello i purchased Q190 with 887 Celeron and updated on windows 8.1. I used latest stable build of XBMC. What am i doing bad ? All videos in XBMC plays bad (12 - 20 fps). A tried some settings and it wont improve playback. Can you post me settings for flawless playback ? Thank you very much and sorry for my bad english..

[PaKman171175]

The only solution for me (and another poster called Rolex) was to go back to XBMC on Windows.

Hey pakman! It's me, rolex ! just chiming in, I'm still on Windows 7 and have not gone back to OpenElec, everything seems to be working perfectly for me pretty much, and I don't believe I have experienced either of the two symptoms you mentioned above.. Mine stays in fullscreen mode or however I have left it when originally exiting the program, and my SMB shares from the NAS have not disconnected at any point unless I've experienced something like a power failure..

All in all, the entire family is pleased with the performance in Win7 and I'll probably leave it this way; why wipe it all out now just to "try something else" that may or may not work...

Where are you at now with this thing?

All working well at the moment. The NFS disconnect may be a sleep/wake thing on the NAS but it's intermittent and does not happen very often so I'm not overly concerned about it. It should be in the log but I dislike exiting out of XBMC and XBMCLauncher shell and going into Windows on the large screen so have not got around to checking the log. I will get around to it.

As for the Window/Full screen, it's happened only twice and remedied via the / (backslash) but again it's only happened a couple of times, annoying but not to the point I was at with OpenElec.

I'm happy with it now and have stopped worrying about setup/config etc and am just enjoying the media experience instead.
Also re-enabled my NetFlix subscription since going back on Windows, and it works brilliantly via the NetfliXBMC addon so taking full advantage.

[angusc]

Hello i purchased Q190 with 887 Celeron and updated on windows 8.1. I used latest stable build of XBMC. What am i doing bad ? All videos in XBMC plays bad (12 - 20 fps). A tried some settings and it wont improve playback. Can you post me settings for flawless playback ? Thank you very much and sorry for my bad english..

Check your screen resolution settings to make sure that all of the edges of XBMC are within the tv screen. I had stuttering until I set the screen resolution on the Q190 using custom settings to ensure that the mouse pointer was within the very edges of ask sides of my 1080 display.

[g4ptek]

Wait until you have an issue with it (I hope you don't), then you'll start to see why I refuse to touch Lenovo again.

Edit: I should add that it did serve its purpose for around a year, but I expect a ~£200 device to last a little longer than that.

why you refuse to touch lenovo again?what's the issue did you have about lenovo?? in a personal computer at my office last years ago the problem still in capasitor of the mainboard all of lenovo branded

[JesusOnEez]

Well, 1 year and 3 months of using my Q190 with perhaps 3 crashes (not bad to be honest...my Sky box used to lock up more often than that), and disaster of disasters, the cooling fan has clapped out.

Still spinning, but I'm guessing a bearing has gone or something as it's making a horrific noise. Removed the fan, cleaned it, put it back, and still no joy. The machine boots up, so I'm not about to spend another £200 getting a new one for the sake of a £15/£20 part, but can I find a replacement fan?

Nope.

Aaaaargh!

If anyone feels like having a root around, it's a Delta Electronics fan, p/n KSB05105HB -CF42.

I can source fans for Q120 & Q150, p/n KSB05105HB -xxxx but I don't know if that's similar enough to work...been googling all morning with no joy (obviously for a UK source). I'm hoping the bit after the hyphen is just a revision number or something as I might just have to give one a go. Next stop, phoning Lenovo for probably more than the cost of the fan itself.

At least I have a Pi to fall back on for the time being.

[flhthemi]

A few drops of mineral oil will shut it up, for a while. I've done this with small case fans several times.

[dmxclass]

Anyone know a place/site to buy Q190 i3 model?

[JesusOnEez]

They seem to be really tricky to get hold of...you can't even get them from Lenovo direct. There are still plenty of the Celeron ones about (which is the one I've got)...hell, you can even get one of them from Argos at a reasonable price.

But at the moment, you're looking at second hand by the looks of things, unless you go for the Celeron instead.

My guess is that Lenovo is running down supplies for whatever the replacement will be...the Q190 is a good couple of years old now. That's my guess anyway.

You could also look at similar Revo's and Zotac boxes...Intel NUC and so on...the NUC and Zotac ranges seem to get updated and refreshed quite often.

[Slack]

"Get the Q190 you wont be disappointed."

Finally fixed the last issue I had with my Q190 (Celeron). was worried I would have to re-purpose it because 3D playback was not working compared to other platforms in the house (SageTV HD200). After getting 3 other laptops out with a mix of 32bit and 64 bit Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 turns out what I thought might be an issue with the Q190 was duplicatable on other boxes. Namely - in 3D half sbs playback the TV was showing a strange shadow image that messed with my family's mind and eyeballs. I had to invert the frame order on the TV to get some semblance of proper depth. Then the shadow image still messed with the quality. Turns out it was related to the TV's own overscan....being anal, before launching KODI, I used the Intel or nVidia applications to tweak the desktop resolution so that the start button, and task bar were completely visible when on the desktop. Much like KODI's calibration interface.....

Well, doing this really messed up 3D half sbs playback, and presumably would do the same with half over under. Leaving the aspect ratio and resolution alone resolved the issue across all laptops and the Q190 I had lined up for testing. Phew thought the Q190 was suffering from some Intel driver weirdness that I could never fix.

Even if I cannot fix it with the TV's own service menu I'll live with it for buttery smooth 3D playback. (Selling two FireTVs that I thought would do KODI justice, but I a done with KODI on Android).

So, the Q190 is in my opinion a steal. Full OS, Great Performance even with rotating disks (I have a Revo Aspire, Intel Atom, ION Video, I put a SSD drive in, that can run KODI just fine, so the Q190 feels like a nice step up), Wifi (although not using it), spdif output, HDMI, VGA, card reader, and a shitload of USB ports. All at the insane price Lenovo was selling these for. A great value if you ask me. The only thing missing is baked in ir receiver - ordered a Flirc to fix this. Have an old USB-UIRT but don't feel like messing with eventghost or girder.

I do not need DTS-HD, or other HD audio that may be a problem with Intel chipsets for others. Dolby, and DTS passthrough are fine with me.
If you are likewise, get the Q190 you wont be disappointed.


All of this was using KODI 14.0 Helix RC3, and XBMC Gotham 13.2 as a sanity check.

---

Well, 1 year and 3 months of using my Q190 with perhaps 3 crashes (not bad to be honest...my Sky box used to lock up more often than that), and disaster of disasters, the cooling fan has clapped out.

Did you have the Q190 in the vertical stand or was it sitting horizontal on it's little rubber feet?
Whichever way you answer I will likely mount it the other way.

[kdnoel]

The Q190 has been flawless for us and we use it horizontal. Great buy and reliable! 1 1/2 year of use here.
We use the Logitech 400 keyboard.