LGR - The Most Unwanted PC
Added 2024-02-14 00:02:14 +0000 UTCBeen taking it easier this week after the big SC3K retroactive last week wiped me out, so here’s a straightforward video about a boring old computer.
And the boringness is the whole idea! These Dell OptiPlex machines are cheap and plentiful for good reason. Many good reasons actually. So I grabbed one on a whim recently and decided to give it a go, not only to see if it was as boring as I assumed but also to see if it somehow survived the capacitor plague.
Yep, that’s it! Simple stuff to go up while I work on more involved things. I’ll be back next time with something odd if all goes well. Have a good one, and lemme know your own opinion on the most unwanted, boring system if you so desire!
Comments
One of these (or a lookalike sibling) was the first Pentium 4 I ever saw in the wild and for that reason alone I kind of like them. Despite the obvious, uh... ((gestures broadly at boring tower))
Peter Metzger
2024-03-05 19:27:55 +0000 UTCAh this is nostalgic. My parents had a Dimension 4500 I think and it looked identical to this, we had it until 2019 but it just sat and collected dust for god knows how long until it served as a home for our DSL modem/router combo so I could get Ethernet on my gaming PC.
LevyNeptune
2024-02-17 22:28:18 +0000 UTCUsed one of these a few years ago for a linux box.
Brett Walton
2024-02-17 05:26:21 +0000 UTCIf you think it'll make for a fun project and/or a useful system once restored, certainly! OptiPlexes can be solid workhorses when running as they should.
LGR
2024-02-16 23:19:28 +0000 UTCLGR , Clint I have a dell Optiplex PC from Goodwill and its memory and several other parts need reinstalling do you suggest I make it a project PC for myself man? Thanks.
Tom Anderson
2024-02-16 23:03:45 +0000 UTCLooks almost idential to my dell i got from the local college surplus sale. lol..not near as old, but...old...and still works good!
Brandie Drown
2024-02-15 06:44:07 +0000 UTCHaving not watched the video yet, it looks similar to the machine that was acting as a fileserver at work, until I came in the day after Christmas last year and it refused to power on until I swapped the PSU out of a spare machine from under my desk. That role is now performed by a new PowerEdge.
moosemaimer
2024-02-15 03:08:58 +0000 UTCAlso I love the motif of “drunk eBay shopping” leading to your career, truly living the dream!
Saul
2024-02-15 02:08:32 +0000 UTCYep, the whole "outdated but not old enough to be really interesting or useful" period for PCs is real. There were just so many of them manufactured too, so I find it hard to imagine them becoming collectible. Especially when those only a couple years later didn't have the caps issue.
LGR
2024-02-15 00:31:30 +0000 UTCWaste not, want not!
LGR
2024-02-15 00:28:37 +0000 UTCNot familiar with that board but dang, just looked it up and that AMD E350 looks pretty awesome for that purpose! Reminds me that I still need to do a build in the Checkmate A1500 Mini case that I bought. Mini-ITX is such a fun form factor and that case is lovely.
LGR
2024-02-15 00:27:14 +0000 UTCHonestly I totally get the appeal, *IF* ones manages to get one that hasn't been killed by its own caps. And I figure the 7xx series is better in that regard. It certainly has improved airflow!
LGR
2024-02-15 00:21:40 +0000 UTCYikes. I mean I get it, if it's fixable for much less than a new machine then why replace it, school funding is scarce... but still surprising. Kudos for keeping the life support going on that poor thing!
LGR
2024-02-15 00:19:58 +0000 UTCThanks, I'm glad you enjoyed! Yeah disregarding the capacitor plague and heat problems, this is an ideal low-cost machine to stock up on for LAN parties. Gotta upgrade mine and see how it performs after a recap.
LGR
2024-02-15 00:18:12 +0000 UTCAh but see, then it wouldn't be the most boring unwanted computer anymore :P That's actually pretty intriguing though, I didn't realize there were ISA slots in those. A much better candidate for Win9x.
LGR
2024-02-15 00:16:44 +0000 UTCRight? I truly expected the worst here, but this seems on-par with a decent GPU from 2002 or so. Crazy that it's taken Intel twenty years to begin to catch up to the competition again.
LGR
2024-02-15 00:15:34 +0000 UTCGo claim one and give it a home, I was serious about the things littering e-cyclers to this day 😁
LGR
2024-02-14 23:37:23 +0000 UTCMan I can only imagine how many you’ve rightfully destroyed, sorry for any traumatic memories! I’m truly curious about why the clamshell was so bad though. Other than airflow and dust issues, I found the tool-less design quite nice in a pinch!
LGR
2024-02-14 23:20:09 +0000 UTCThis brings back lots of memories from a job I had 15 years ago. We had a bunch of these Optiplex GX 2xx series, and I think the 270 were more of the high end machines we had which were reserved for the developers.
Chad Armstrong
2024-02-14 23:11:38 +0000 UTCCan't wait to see if there's a follow up. Curious the compatibility with different cards.
Dustin Matteson
2024-02-14 19:52:41 +0000 UTCWell..I want that PC.
Alex Weiss
2024-02-14 17:32:17 +0000 UTCI work in IT (20years) and I have discarded so many of these Dells, I have also sold a couple to people who needs a box that has Windows XP installed. They can still be useful, and they are found a thrift stores all the time. Now they have finally become "retro" in a sense.
John Piscopo
2024-02-14 17:27:26 +0000 UTCReasons why it's such a boring pc: It's black. Designed for windows XP. Pentium 4 To modern and not great for playing the games of it's era.
Uncleawesome
2024-02-14 15:37:31 +0000 UTCI came here wondering why he did that. Guess it's because some foam at the mouth over how paste is applied.
DasGutt
2024-02-14 13:43:20 +0000 UTCmy dad had a few of these for business use, solid and reliable in fact they still work amazingly. I can vividly remember staying up till 4am playing GTA on one of these. Good times!
Mat Cooper
2024-02-14 12:26:16 +0000 UTCi had a friend who used to call these a “povertyplex” as his organisation would buy thousands of the lowest tier models
Shane Baker
2024-02-14 10:16:02 +0000 UTCMy father got one of those optiplexes, we used it for many years. When it came time to retire it I picked it apart and saved the cpu and the memory!
Sina Farhat
2024-02-14 08:55:26 +0000 UTCYep, throw a GF4 Ti at it, replace those caps and it is a pretty decent WinXP retro gaming rig. Especially with retro prices as they are. Somewhat recently i got me an ASRock E350M1 for my Checkmate A1500 case, fits in there quite nicely and has enough airflow going to not overheat the poor AMD. Installed XP on there and for the 35€ i paid for the board it is doing a pretty fine job. Something that AMD does right is integrated graphics, never disappoints. Ok, it is no fat Geforce Whatever but it does the job. And for the games i play on that one the AMD Radeon HD 6310 is more than enough. And the CPU core, an AMD E350, is sleeping trough the whole ordeal anyway. ;)
BastetFurry
2024-02-14 07:30:42 +0000 UTCI got a litter of optiplexs with matching CRT monitors and laser printers from this era. It was like a bad joke being given these complete systems every time I did a pc house call. It was like "oh by the way take this with you" and as expected it would be a dell blue monstrosity that's been used as a utility closet door stop for a decade. Btw I get a good kek over the clever ways you hide thermal compound applications.
PiraTed
2024-02-14 06:15:14 +0000 UTCIf you're wanting to keep your paste secret from the youtube pitchfork bunch, there's a little glimpse of it left in there still ;-) My best mate at the time had one of these. It was very much a replacement for a family imac and a foray into pc gaming at the time though. I believe he had a discreet graphics card though so we got on ok with it. I had a custom build with some fairly bargain hardware too. I went asus but bargain shop graphics though so mine was more reliable but performed somewhat average.
Andrew Kirkby
2024-02-14 06:00:12 +0000 UTCI got my OptiPlex 755 desktop PC for free cause yeah nobody wants these. But I think they are fun to use for XP era gaming.
Alyxx the Rat
2024-02-14 04:50:53 +0000 UTCI processed literally thousands of these at my ecycle jobs. They are absolutely horrible. The clamshell design was such a misfire, made them awful to work on, they're dust traps, they look awful, and most of them are dead. Good riddance.
Cathode Ray Dude
2024-02-14 04:35:58 +0000 UTCOh god I have one (1) of these still in service at work. Public school district tech shop, laser cutter that only communicates via parallel port/Windows XP, and admin that won’t budget to upgrade it. I’ve cannibalized at least two other towers trying to keep that thing alive
Fujiyosky
2024-02-14 04:24:46 +0000 UTCI really dig this style of video. As someone who hosts retro LAN parties, I always welcome people donating these types of "who cares" "an computer" type systems, as they can easily be transformed into a retro LAN beast (ut99, cs1.5, etc.) for my friends who don't really care to own their own retro systems but are happy to participate. I have a few dell dimensions that have this styling that i use, and they run rings around my go to lan rig (p3 700mhz with v3 3000 agp) anyway, this and the sc3k video have made me very happy, thanks clint!
Arizona Palms
2024-02-14 04:20:31 +0000 UTCOh man you are just one model up from something really interesting! As far as I know the GX260 was the last Dell system that had an ISA slot option. The more normal configuration had two PCI slots on an option board next to the rest of the slots but you could also opt to get one ISA slot instead. We had a bunch of these at a previous employer to run old dos software that used custom ISA com cards to talk with industrial machinery. We also had some 270s as well to run things that didn't need that specific card since the systems were nearly identical otherwise and it made management easy. No idea if they are still using them but they were when I left in 2020.
Knifethrower
2024-02-14 03:51:22 +0000 UTCI'm kinda surprised the graphics acceleration is working as well as it is... It's almost like when Intel started integrating GPU stuff they were right there in the pack in terms of performance, and then unlike nVidia and AMD who started racing towards massive performance gains and features Intel just sorta... limped along. :P
Kris Asick
2024-02-14 03:47:55 +0000 UTCHa, I do not doubt that. The main reason I discovered it back then is because of the machines we had at the library, it was how I transferred stuff to USB that I downloaded using their nice broadband — mostly abandonware and MP3s 😁
LGR
2024-02-14 02:38:38 +0000 UTCThey sure do, especially the second and third generation ones from the early 2000s. So much boring bluish-gray plastic.
LGR
2024-02-14 02:36:13 +0000 UTCUgh yeah those glorified thin clients and mini ITX things. Some make awesome retro rigs, but so many of those just don’t do anything without being connected to their original network and take modification to become useful again.
LGR
2024-02-14 02:35:21 +0000 UTCYou got it, man. The thing stands out about as much as a blender in my mind.
LGR
2024-02-14 02:33:31 +0000 UTCCan’t blame ‘em! I didn’t know how awfully Dell handled that ordeal until reading about it for this video, it’s nuts how complacent they were from the top down.
LGR
2024-02-14 02:32:40 +0000 UTCTrue, I can’t recall seeing nearly as many towers back in the day. Other than in like, the boss’s office. They always got the biggest fanciest OptiPlex.
LGR
2024-02-14 02:31:14 +0000 UTCI do remember being pretty excited when the switch from beige to black/gray happened. Now it’s beige that I want back again, somehow I can’t help it 😄
LGR
2024-02-14 02:30:15 +0000 UTCAhh those huge educational institution headphones. Often holdovers from decades earlier!
LGR
2024-02-14 02:26:13 +0000 UTCOoh definitely, there are no doubt casualties.
LGR
2024-02-14 02:25:27 +0000 UTCI worked on-site tech support when those were common. It's amazing how many people had those that had no idea the front flap opened to reveal the audio and USB ports.
Anonymous Freak
2024-02-14 01:34:55 +0000 UTCFor a moment I thought that was a 2000s-era Dell Dimension. Their computers all looked like one another for awhile there.
Anicast
2024-02-14 01:23:03 +0000 UTCAh, I can't bring myself to totally dislike these - or at least, the general Optiplex aesthetic, they make me nostalgic for when my high school started to upgrade stuff all around starting about...'99, or 2000? I remember all the teachers got one and a fancy phone-intercom, and then over the next few years the computer classes/labs started having all the beige machines replaced with the blue-grey Dells - though I think by the time the latter happened, the school opted for the smaller horizontal units. (I'm not super clear on models, whoops.) My personal most-unwanted is, I suppose, the descendant of these - the extremely miniaturized things for business that are so aggressively stripped down and get most of their stuff off the company network. (Or, are supposed to, but if your call center employer doesn't have that set up right and you gotta do half your job via browser, these things shit to death multiple times a shift...)
Valora Inverse
2024-02-14 01:03:29 +0000 UTCIt really is just "A Computer". It's just as much as an appliance as a microwave or fridge.
Rick Green
2024-02-14 00:26:07 +0000 UTCI worked with a fortune 50 large org that tried dell in 2003-2005 during the peak of the plague . They were so mad at the way the service was handled at that time they never bought another dell product
Evil Biden
2024-02-14 00:18:55 +0000 UTCThat yours is a tower alone makes it infinitely less boring. I've only ever seen the flat desktop ones — *the* PC for *all* schools and offices without exception. In fact I kinda want one out of nostalgia...
Pietro Gagliardi
2024-02-14 00:10:02 +0000 UTChonestly I find them nostalgic just because I remember seeing them in my schools, I remember the computer lab having windows 98 beige desktops and then one year the teachers had these at their desks and the next year they had filled the computer lab
mychemicalbromance
2024-02-14 00:09:19 +0000 UTCI adore this!! These are the first computers I remember using in elementary school (yeah I’m a bit younger lol) in our computer lab (we called it a CCC lab… no idea why) and came with those massive over-year headphones for whatever edutainment we had to face that day. Love the obscure hardware!
Saul
2024-02-14 00:07:34 +0000 UTCWow, never thought I'd see this one on LGR! I've got several in my basement collecting dust, I guess I ought to check on the capacitors
Dan Fiscus
2024-02-14 00:04:43 +0000 UTC
