New Toy

[jronald]

So I picked up this to use at work, as they dont allow us to have access to the internet.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/282432242210?_t ... EBIDX%3AIT

About the size an X31 but twice as thick. Tiny foot print, easy to stash behind the monitor. Runs W7 64bit blisteringly fast. I swapped in 4 gig total of Hynix I had floating around, a WD Black 150gig HDD and used the SLIC 2.1 bios to activate. Guy accepted my offer so Im into with new money less than $40.00. We have hotspots surrounding my location so Im still not using any of the work network. Have KVM to switch between the work and this unit, discreet and there when I need to find what Im looking for. Well protected with a detailed password, that only makes sense to me.

Ron

[shawross]

Would be handy for a Home Theatre PC if it had DVI out. Generally these small footprint units aren't too noisy.

[thinkpadcollection]

hey, I have ultra slim 8200 too! Tiny and packs i5-2500s along with HD5450 512MB mxm. Worth doing and running win 10 pro but someday and would recommand to anyone to build a ultra slim 8300 (this is inexpensive still and is ivy bridge) with HD7650A mxm (have to find a heatsink for it or make one and screws and x bracket).

I appreciated HP so much that I also now have workstation Z220 CMT (socket 1155 sandy/ivy bridge, supports ECC unbuffered, i3, i5, i7 Xeon as well) all set to replace optiplex 780 was my main pc for years. I'm not impressed with Dell now, let say T3510 expansion capabilities is only 2x 3.5" and 1x 5.25 bay, equivalent for that is Z420, 3 3.5" bays, 2 spare 5.25" bays or swap out optical drive for 3rd 5.25" bay. Also slots are excellent as well.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection.

[pianowizard]

USFF desktops are super cute! I absolutely adored the Dell Optiplex 790 USFF I had but it was used so little that I decided to sell it.

I appreciated HP so much that I also now have workstation Z220 CMT (socket 1155 sandy/ivy bridge, supports ECC unbuffered, i3, i5, i7 Xeon as well) all set to replace optiplex 780 was my main pc for years. I'm not impressed with Dell now, let say T3510 expansion capabilities is only 2x 3.5" and 1x 5.25 bay, equivalent for that is Z420, 3 3.5" bays, 2 spare 5.25" bays or swap out optical drive for 3rd 5.25" bay. Also slots are excellent as well.

Having more PCI/PCIe slots and HDD bays was also the reason I bought my current HP 8200 and 8300 Elite minitowers rather than Dell. I also had the dc7900 and the 8000 Elite (both minitowers) until very recently. Unfortunately, three of these four machines gave me various issues, which were relatively minor but were annoying enough that I think I will go back to Dell in the future. I have found Dell desktops and minitowers to be more reliable and serviceable.

Now that 10TB HDDs are available and affordable, I no longer need minitowers with more than two HDD bays. When I bought the abovementioned 8200 Elite, 3TB was the max. Also, now that I have huge giant UHD and QHD monitors, I get enough real estate on just 2 - 3 monitors and no longer need to install many video cards to drive 6 - 8 smaller WUXGA monitors. Desktop computation is more convenient than ever. The same can be said about mobile computation, and indeed I am selling the Panasonic and Sony in my signature and will likely never buy traditional laptops again. Laptops are so 1990s!

[thinkpadcollection]

What kinds of these problems had with your HP computer, pianowizard?

Dell is still poor even newer.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[pianowizard]

What kinds of these problems had with your HP computer, pianowizard?

dc7900: After a certain BIOS update, using both the built-in VGA and DisplayPort outputs became impossible (the system slowed down dramatically), and the BIOS did not permit reverting to the previous version. That was the final BIOS version, so that dc7900 was stuck with that problem. I sold it a couple weeks ago to someone who will never hook it up to two monitors

8200 Elite: For years I have been leaving this one powered up and connected to the internet 24/7, and configured it to update Windows automatically. When it was running Windows 7, most of the times that it updated Windows and restarted, it failed to restart successfully. Windows 10 fixed this problem, but now and then the computer would still fail to wake up the monitor when I move the mouse or hit a key on the keyboard.

8300 Elite: I have driver issues with the integrated graphics fairly often. This is probably mainly Windows 10's fault, but none of my other Windows 10 machines have given me this much trouble with Intel video drivers.

Dell is still poor even newer.

Not in my experience, which started in the Pentium MMX era (I still have a fully functional Optiplex Gn+! It looks like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-OPTIPLEX-G ... Sw~AVYvzSg) and included every generation through Core i gen 3, mostly Optiplexes but there were a handful of Inspirons, Vostros and Precisions as well. If you are talking about Dells since Core i gen 4, then I can't disagree because I haven't tried any. If you are talking about problems with the GX280, the capacitor defect wasn't really Dell's fault. If you are talking about Dells that you bought second-hand, sometimes it's hard to tell whether a problem was caused by the previous owner. I bought the 8200 and 8300 HPs new, and the BIOS issue with the dc7900 was clearly HP's doing. If you are talking design such as the number of expansion slots, that's different from reliability.

[jronald]

Discovered something new yesterday on one of these puppies. The come with a Mine PCI-e port. Put the card in and your wireless! Not quite that easy, but easy enough to make it happen.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wireless-WiFi-K ... SwnHZYfOly

I went with
http://www.ebay.com/itm/272250431309?_t ... EBIDX%3AIT

Not sure of the whitelist so I already have a backup plan.

Ron

[kfzhu1229]

If you are talking about problems with the GX280, the capacitor defect wasn't really Dell's fault.

It's mostly GX270 and some GX280 that are affected. But GX280 is still better than GX520 which has only 2 RAM slots and no PCIE
And yes dell OptiPlex are very reliable desktop machines just like ThinkPads of laptops. I've never seen an OptiPlex computer from any school that are thrown out because of their own defects (its either because of their age or sometimes they think it's defective while it's only RAM contacts being loose, yea those technicians are that stupid).

[kfzhu1229]

Discovered something new yesterday on one of these puppies. The come with a Mine PCI-e port. Put the card in and your wireless! Not quite that easy, but easy enough to make it happen.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wireless-WiFi-K ... SwnHZYfOly

Well I went with a generic Chinese miniPCI to PCI adapter.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/291851909889
it's certainly cheap, only cad $10 and can make use of my spare 2200bg cards.
However things didn't go as smooth as I've thought of at all.
1. it took 3 months to arrive
2. One of the two cards has a disconnected surface mount resistor OOTB. I doubt it does anything but I soldered it back in anyways
3. I plugged in my 2200bg card and while it seems like everything is working, it doesn't load any webpages. After 2 hours playing with the jumpers, it turned out that the antenna isn't fully working, so I plugged in two spare antenna from a broken t4x lid one for each of the two cards.
4. Now that I finally got it to work and excited to plug the two cards onto my OptiPlex GX520 and 755, only to discover that it only works in my GX520, not 755 - Intel 2200bg card has no x64 driver because the Pentium M CPUs it bundled with have no x64 capabilities anyways. And I'm not putting x86 for 755 because it has 8gb RAM.
So now my GX520 uses the same card as my T23, A30p and one of my T43 machines which is fairly stable in my opinion if treated properly, while my 755 is using a retired VEX robotics key I found inside a school as WiFi card

[malmso]

So are you content with your toy? Can you still recomment it?

[kfzhu1229]

Well it's a value buy if:
1: if you think you can fix whatever problems it causes
2: can endure the long shipping time
3: if you have a PC with PCI slot and x86 operating system
4: don't want to waste a PCIe slot and have a miniPCI card as spare
Hopefully it gives you an idea of what you at getting

[jronald]

I picked up another in the Athlon II variety.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/122478361989?_t ... EBIDX%3AIT
seems to be a little faster to be honest.

Ron

[kfzhu1229]

IF you got the bigger sided version with that c2d variant, you can put a Xeon inside, you know.
To be honest the Xeon mod is pretty cool. Did one for a school (OptiPlex 960), I liked it so I did one myself with OptiPlex 755 (Oldest machine that supports Xeon mod) which came with the lowest Pentium D anyways.