Dell Optiplex

Dubsey

Hi all,

Bit of a newbie.

Basically I've gotten a Del Optiplex GX280 PC free from work with following basic spec:
-Pentium 4,
-0.99 GB RAM,
-37.2 GB HDD storage.

Mostly it works OK but sometimes very sluggish.

I've bought an external hard drive cause I figure the comp needs all the space it gan get. I've also wiped it and re-installed windows.

I'm not a gamer so don't need high-end performance.

Just wondering if anyone has upgraded one of these and if some decent RAM and possibly a new HDD would leave me with a good machine or whether I should just buy/try to build a decent one.

Chers,

D.

uberpixie

Dubsey wrote: »

Hi all,

Bit of a newbie.

Basically I've gotten a Del Optiplex GX280 PC free from work with following basic spec:
-Pentium 4,
-0.99 GB RAM,
-37.2 GB HDD storage.

Mostly it works OK but sometimes very sluggish.

I've bought an external hard drive cause I figure the comp needs all the space it gan get. I've also wiped it and re-installed windows.

I'm not a gamer so don't need high-end performance.

Just wondering if anyone has upgraded one of these and if some decent RAM and possibly a new HDD would leave me with a good machine or whether I should just buy/try to build a decent one.

Chers,

D.

Well this is the Building and upgrading form so the "right" answer is build of course!

The Dell GX280 is a very long in the tooth machine.

See if you can get free compatible ram from work and up the ram to at least 2gig and then up to 3gig if possible.

If I takes SATA harddrives, you could replace the current with a cheap SSD (Solid State Disk) which should improve day to day performance.

What CPU is in the PC? if it is a single core P4 do not expect miracles....

I would not invest a lot of money in this pc as is simply is too old to get anything out of.

It would however be a good PC to learn the basics of upgrading before moving on to build your own. And should server as a basic internet pc.

smacl

I've a bunch of Optiplexes of various vintages including an old 270 with small form factor case, 512mb RAM. I added a 500GB hard disk, wireless network USB, fresh copy of XP, and use it as a media player under the telly. Works a treat for movies, basic internet, music and family photos, though it tends to run a bit hot and doesn't like being left on all the time. The upgrade was essentially free as I scavenged the other bits from other PCs I was upgrading.

TerrorFirmer

Use WinXP and add a cheap SSD and you should see hugely increased performance even leaving the rest of the specs alone, although if you could come by more RAM free or cheap, wouldn't do it any harm either - but 1GB is OK for XP.

Dubsey

Thanks for the advice.

Will sniff around work IT tomorrow (they're a decent bunch) for any old RAM and do a bit of research on the HDD.

segasega

Did I not read somewhere that XP dosent like ssds?

Serephucus

Nah, it's fine. Win7 is slightly better in that it can detect SSDs and auto-disable caching and stuff like that, but you just do that manually for XP.

(NB: You should be running Win7 for better performance. It's faster than XP at this point, even on hardware like that)