On 5/6/2025 9:06 AM, Kenneth Seefried via vcf-midatlantic wrote:

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From: Kenneth Gober <kgober@gmail.com>

In my experience, the Dell OptiPlex 745 and 755 lines have been very solid.

Can confirm that Dell Optiplex machines from the LGA775 era seem pretty reliable. In addition to having a couple of thousand pass through our company back in the day, I still have several Dell Optiplex 960 desktop FF in a mix of Core Duo and Quad that are my regular 'crash and burn' machines (and a couple of later Optiplex i7-860s); they aren't exactly treated gently. Despite the abuse, they have never given me any trouble. The only real downside I run into if you want to call it that is the 8GB memory limit on that generation of kit. YMMV.

And no, mine have never needed a recap. That is not a foregone conclusion.

Agreed on this as well, I myself use and know many others who use machines from this era. The CPU is great and the machines are versatile and expandable. I still use a 980 as my main workstation (with 16 GB of RAM and two dual display cards). Personally, I think the 755-780 line of OptiPlexes was among the best line of workstations Dell ever made. They were truly ubiquitous for more than a decade. I'm still a bit cranky they didn't bring back the PS/2 ports until the 960/980 series a couple years later! Sadly, it seems the OptiPlex line went downhill some time after that - I don't have anything newer than 2010 (my 980s), but it seems like ports started disappearing some time after that, beginning with the parallel port (which I still use). I've only had one issue to note with an OptiPlex - some time last year, I did have an OptiPlex GX620 (~2005, so slightly older than the 745) which suddenly stopped working at one point. I think the machine may even have been on prior, but one day I went to use it and it was effectively dead, wouldn't even POST or anything - I think the diagnostic lights indicated a memory issue, but I ruled that out by swapping out all the RAM. I talked to Dell about it and they suggested it was indeed probably some kind of motherboard issue. Since I had so many spare OptiPlexes, I just relegated that machine to propping something up, but if bad caps are a common issue for that line, it sounds like maybe it would be worth me revisiting that and seeing if it's fixable. I've been afraid to use the other (working) GX620 I have, just in case a similar issue happened...