The Trash-Picked BRAND NEW Dell OptiPlex

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Today's video is about a super boring Dell OptiPlex. Well... it would be boring if I hadn't found it in the trash despite looking brand new! So let's see what's up with this thing.

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Background Music:

Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It

Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.

#MichaelMJD #Linux #Windows

[MichaelMJD]

A few people suggested checking the power on hours count on the original HDD, so I did and... 2 hours!

[placeholderusername]

I got a dell optiplex 3040 from the trash. It’s my main pc now

[Koopai]

I love it when people rescue these old machines. Many people just don't see the full potential of these old computers.

[warhaggis]

For Dells you can take the service tag or express service code (you can see it at around 1:26) to the support site to get the exact system configuration and its full history, including any service events like if it was repaired (it says you need an email address to view - anything will work). This Dell was shipped to a customer/client in El Salvador on 22 June 2015.

[Gravarty]

Don't forget to make a backup of the recovery partition! Afaik there's only one version of the 3020 on archive that doesn't seem to work (and it's only for the mid tower version)

[the_ejumper_]

Optiplexs are always a great option. Super cheap 99% of the time for a computer that is plenty good enough for everyday tasks and even some gaming with a few minor upgrades

[valensomm]

I've worked in IT for 9 years now and regularly handeled these different optiplex models in big production environments and I have never had to RMA any of these sffs unlike the laptops, they are really solid and stable machines

[gggnkg]

I work with a lot of these, we still run them in the office. Honestly, even the older ones, those that run the Ivy Bridge processors are still absolutely fine for lighter tasks.
I managed to snag one off work, found an i5 3470 for pocket change, got an ssd, got the ram up to 16 gigs, installed a fresh WIndows 10. Easily can watch YouTube at 1080p, file editing, word, excels, all work absolutely fine. got an sff rx550 and managed to play quite a few games, from 90s classics, to 2000s goats like san andreas and various nfs, ending up with 2010s with the likes of payday 2 and war thunder.

[FloweyFanClub]

instantly blasted back to highschool where someone printed out a picture of a troll face and shoved it in the disk drive of one of these guys.

[kalarse]

Holy, this is so nostalgic. When I worked as helpdesk, I used to support PCs like this (among a lot of other versions of the OptiPlex). When you opened it, it opened some memories.
I remember when we were migrating from Win7 to Win10, and we also changed the HDDs to SSDs, which Dell had the great idea of making this so easy to work on, honestly, great experience with OptiPlexes overall!

[HighImpactFluffage]

Seeing that hard drive mechanism instantly brought back memories of working in a recycling center back in high school as part of an exchange program and running into a couple of these arguably incredibly boring but to me weirdly delightful office/professional PCs.

Even if some of them were less than ideal when it came to stuff like cooling and such, I've always appreciated these OptiPlexes and their competitors' counterparts. It was incredibly easy to get into them and either scrap them for parts or fix them up and give them a new lease on life, so many things used tool-free mounts, things were easy to disassemble, I even remember some of them having a motherboard tray that tilted out so you could work on it. It genuinely felt like someone made those cases with the consideration that some underpaid IT guy would have to repair them quite frequently when something went wrong and they were made with that in mind.

It's been over 10 years since I last had the pleasure of cracking one open, but every time I see one in a video like this, it's a delight I can't quite explain.

[realtoadtech]

These things are everywhere, they aged like fine wine when it comes to "it just works performance"

[pastalex]

“Mostly uninteresting”

It’s not nice to lie, Michael. You know why we’re all here.

[jrr]

It's probably the "spare". Most large companies will buy a few extras when the do their hardware refreshes. Need 48, buy 50 so you can have a spare on the shelf. Sometimes they get used... Sometimes they don't. This is the spare that was never needed.

[metroplex]

A coworker of mine actually bought a shit ton of these from a surplus auction. we have actually had to buy some off of him, to sell to customers who needed a replacement machine. his original plan with buying them was to sell to low income families in our area. these things are workhorses!

[leroyjethrogibbs]

I have 5 of those on a shelf next to me right now. They hardly ever die. Run windows 11 perfectly fine as long as you got enough ram and the i5.

[xGMV]

Where I'm from, this stuff is unheard of. Even DDR2 RAM is expensive, SSDs for me are mythical sightings, never used one myself, or a GPU.
Junk PCs here are really, but really old stuff and they're usually broken beyond repair, water damaged, or burnt.

[Revoltyx]

I love Dell Optiplex machines. They're so fun to mess around with, wish they were a bit more flexible in terms of components but small form factor and easy to service

[jessthnthree]

i swear that old high end office computers are a hidden gym

i have two older high end Dells and ever since I made my custom PC be a proxmox server, they have been my partner and I's main computers

Dells in particular tend to be pretty easy to repair and upkeep

[jheitz]

I use this exact 3020 at work! By now I’ve upgraded just about everything inside 😂 (even managed to get a 4790k in there) it still holds up wonderfully and I’m convinced this generation of optiplexes were some of the best workstations ever made, as I’ve also serviced and used various other models at a previous job.