Shocking...I Actually LIKE The Dell OptiPlex 390 SFF Desktop - Jody Bruchon Tech

[@TemperedMedia]

As someone who foolishly bought and summarily lost a small form factor PC (we all make mistakes lol) i cannot stress how important standard parts really are.

[@Tall_Order]

0:38 I have similar issues to this with every HP tower I ever work on. Right now I just finished repairing a slimline. YOu have to hold both hands in the center of the rails and push forward to get the panel to close. Otherwise a few of the teeth don't go down, and you have a giant hump sticking out. The only thing wrong with the actual computer was a faulty memory card. All that hassle just to find that out.

[@Tall_Order]

That being said, the slimline also used standard parts. Of course they removed all the PCI busses to fit the mobo in behind the psu. That kinda made me annoyed a bit. Imagine buying something that would go in one of those, and finding out you can't. Or worse yet, imagine your customer doing that, and expected YOU to install it. And you have to explain that to them.

[@TheCasualHazeFox]

I dislike HP/Compaq and so on. So many issues I've encountered of the years with them. With Dell I could always get quick assistance but with HP I found often it was harder to get support before discontinuation BS. Though I will say, I've had a couple HPs I've worked on and built out of myself to where the towers themselves and parts were still sufficiently strong with an old i5. The worst thing I've experienced with HP is the cutting of my fingers on their non rounded off edging they used to ship out all the time before too many complaints.

[@Tall_Order]

@@TheCasualHazeFox Yeah my fingers got a nice slicing a few times on these as well.

[@JodyBruchon]

I know exactly the kind of machine you're talking about.

[@alexisguerrero7551]

I still have that model along with a first gen poweredge t110, the dell optiplex 390 I max out the specs and made sure to give it an ssd drive and update the ram to 16 gigs of ram with windows 10.

[@Thatrandomguy384]

I would go so far as to say that the Optiplex product line in general has produced some of the best pre-built OEM PC's ever.

[@TheCasualHazeFox]

Certainly so! Optiplex to this day from what I've seen around businesses that have a contract with Dell use mostly Optiplex lines and from what I've seen with my personal works is the PSUs just go out of them eventually / first. Easy fix and otherwise stable for longevity.

[@alanforsyth2628]

I have an old Lenovo where all the casing panels fold out and the drives and cards just pull out using the blue handles. Great design for maintenance. Not a single screw to be undone!

[@Truth_Teller_101]

Spoiler alert: Any computer you buy preassembled is guaranteed to have the cheapest parts they could possibly find, put together by the person they could get away with paying the lowest possible wage--->and don't expect that computer to last an hour over whatever "warranty" they've given you, and if you ever have to redeem that "warranty" expect them to not honor it using any excuse they can get away with.

[@50shadesofbeige88]

I totally understand where you're coming from. As someone who is an engineer at an ODM, I can guarantee you this is not the case. I'm not in the PC market, I mostly work on mobile devices. Yes, everything is built to a price, but the component quality is important. There is a point where saving $0.01 on a $0.34 part is not worth it. A company like Dell has a reputation to uphold, especially in the Enterprise space. If you factor that in with the cost to qualify a component and add it to the manifest it is often not worth the savings.

[@TheCasualHazeFox]

@@50shadesofbeige88 My electronics friends would agree with this. Ever seen an Engineer get pissed off when they're handed a subpar part that is difficult for them to work on efficiently because the part itself is cheaper than a more refined part? Let's just say, the Engineers let the company know via how many "broken" cheap parts get. A few at a time adds up to costing more to replace than just getting the right part to work with. ;)

[@moetocafe]

@@50shadesofbeige88 Dell is a miserable company to buy today. But so are most of the other brands too. The market is at its lowest point so far. The only thing Dell I appreciate and love is my monitor, it's 5 yrs old, but is working great. When I compared it in the shop with few different competitive monitors, it was standing out with near perfect white-balance and color representation. Unfortunately, can't say a good word for my new Dell laptop. The most plastic... thing, I've ever seen. Great mistake to buy it.

[@johnbuller2132]

Thanks for the tip Jody; what’s your favorite system to work on?

[@JodyBruchon]

@@johnbuller2132 Custom builds that don't try to hide the wires. Failing that, anything like this one that's truly tool-less for most maintenance. Side panel is just a handle release, no screws. All drives removable with a yank. Everything generally reachable and not covered by other things that aren't tool-less.

[@TheCasualHazeFox]

@@JodyBruchon Amen to that! Hiding wiring and tracing them to various ports and then putting them back the way they were is a total headache for someone like me.

[@TheCasualHazeFox]

Just like myself! I have found so many of these just throw away. Usually because of a bad power supply and businesses or private owners just throw them out. This particular Optiplex had such a GREAT form factor for cleaning out office or garbage gunk and one hour of cleaning + upgraded parts also taken from other "broken" ones it was so easy to simply put it all together and replace the power supply with a new upgraded or another working PSU from one of the other disposed of ones I found in the trash or were just given to me to reduce waste. They're VERY good because of that, albeit, limited in some regard but for a upgradable workstation it's great. The only thing I ever had to manually do was cut or bend / glue some extra room into the case for larger projects. One of the few Dell Designs I got 0 qualms with.

[@YatesNet]

These Dell Optiplexes are beloved. Lenovo kinda killed the Thinkpad for me years ago but it remains one of the very best laptops today. DELL is HELL but the Optiplex Remains the Budget King! That is :-(

[@repairstudio4940]

I enjoy my Lenovo lappy, it's been a great machine. IBM has had as many issues as almost every PC and tech retailer....successes, absolute fails and progression or in many cases regression. They been in the game longer than others but timestamps doesn't validate the scrutiny but as Jody emphasizes some of the designs absolutely do. Machines in the future aren't meant for techs like us to repair ...nope, they're meant to be retired and new hardware purchased ...sad but true. Dell, notta fan but their 390s and big ole 790s are still not bad machines with easy upgrades.

[@moetocafe]

Back in the win7 times they (all major manufacturers) were still making things overall good. But it is no longer the case. My new Dell laptop is so cheap plastic all the way and the battery is integrated, that it's in a constant state of 1-step away from damage, or at least that is the feeling I get from it. Adjusting the screen position alters the WiFi speed greatly - just to give you an example. Usually, inside the laptop's monitor frame around the screen is hidden a wire-antenna for WiFi. I guess it doesn't do a good job on my laptop. And it's not just Dell, I mean all (or almost all) new laptops are piles of crap. I have an old Lenovo ThinkPad, business class, which is a bit old, but still working well and was made solid, hard to compare to any new laptop. The first laptops were built by engineers. The laptops now are built by marketeers.

[@SkyFly19853]

Dell is used to be a good product... as for me, I stick to HP as a long time user...