Reliability of Windows 7 on Dell Optiplex GX280

[iSteve]

Hello,

 

We have a load of Dell Optiplex GX280 machines (P4 3.2GHz, 2GB of DDR-667 RAM, 120GB SATA hard drive). Recently a few of these have started to blue screen with inconsistent reasons. Today one died with win32.sys as a problem, then 10 mins after that 'memory management'. On one machine we have systematically replaced the HDD / RAM, re-imaged etc but it was still unreliable.

 

Does anyone here have experience of using Win 7 Pro on these machines? Do you find it reliable?

 

As much as we know these aren't modern computers, most are not up for replacement yet, so we can't throw them out and get i7 workstations (or i3 for that matter).

 

Thanks!

[difinity]

From memory, i think these Dell's suffer from leaking capacitors. Take the side off and have a look.

[iSteve]

I will have a look! I think these are around the same age as a bunch of Macs we had which had capacitor problems.

[MatthewL]

I wouldn't dream of putting Windows 7 on a GX280.

 

We have got rid of all of ours, they must be 10 years old now.

[DrCheese]

^ Yes that's correct. We had a suite of these for around 6 years and eventually the majority of them had to have their caps replaced as they had burst, causing all sorts of random errors. Check that first as that may be causing you the hassle.

Still, damn good machines. They ran Windows 7 pretty well considering their age.

[iSteve]

The cases are date stamped 2005.

[MatthewL]

Yes the GX270 and GX280's both had the capacitor problem, the 270's were worse for it.

[iSteve]

Thanks guys. We picked these machines up FoC and most are fine. At least I know that others have had issues - and now I can stop trying to troubleshoot machines that inconsistent faults!

[dhicks]

From memory, i think these Dell's suffer from leaking capacitors.

 

Ah, that's what the problem was. We had a number of these suddenly go nuts - the fan would start getting louder and louder, running faster and faster, until we switched them off. I think I've just retired the last one today.

[cloudljj]

i got a dell gx280 and run win7 i hav found no errors works great

[cloudljj]

it runs 3.4gh 2gb ram and 1tb ata hd

[Yeo695]

I would avoid win 7 on these machines for numerous reasons. But if you must it should work enough to get by. Edited July 15, 2013 by Yeo695

[DrCheese]

eh, we didn't really have a problem with it. Sure it ran "slow" but better than I thought they would. I didn't want a single trace of XP left...

[Zourous]

We still have GX280's in our staff rooms with windows 7 on them and never had a software related problem, and no one seems to complain about their performance (that's probably because we've only just got rid of our GX260's in the last year). Once you hear one reving up and down, you know it's on it's way out and eventually it will hit aircraft mode. I just get another one off our spares pile and swap over the whole base unit, job done. No point trying to work out what is going on with them, you'll be there forever.

[DrCheese]

99% of the time it's the caps on these machines. We'd just solder replacements on when they'd die.

[Duke5A]

I used to make a fair amount of money re-capping those things for local businesses. Thanks Dell!

 

Windows 7 should run just fine on them with 2GB of RAM; they're really just an overgrown netbook and those run it OK. I wouldn't waste money buying licenses for 280s though. Only do it if you subscribe to EES. Other than that and it really isn't worth it.