Dell OptiPlex 780 - Back to Home

Back on the first article for this site, I fixed up an old Dell OptiPlex 210L with the intention of using it for some basic web browsing. Unfortunately, I far underestimated just how garbage the Pentium 4 Cedar Mill is, so it didn't turn out to be that useful on the modern web. Thus, earlier this year, I finally set up my much more powerful OptiPlex 780 as my secondary PC.

The OptiPlex 780. I forgot to get a new photo, so this photo is about a year old.

My OptiPlex 780 previously sat unused for over a year, because the GX620 replaced it for most of my old software & hardware needs. What made me want to boot it up again was PhilsComputerLab's videos on the Core 2 Duo & Quad, which gave me the inspiration to try & turn my 780 in to a PC for modern tasks.

My Tiny Core Linux desktop.

The full specs of this machine are:

  • Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3GHz
  • 4GB DDR3 1066 RAM
  • Intel Q45 Express Chipset
  • DVD-RW Drive
  • Seagate 1TB HDD (with Windows 2000)
  • 32GB USB Flash Drive (with Tiny Core Linux 13.1)

    • I decided to use a USB drive as the boot drive for my Linux install, because I didn't want to mess with repartitioning the 1TB NTFS drive & potentially screw up my 2000 install. The performance while running off of USB is better than I expected, but I still might swap the HDD at some point & then install Linux again.

    The reason I went with Tiny Core as my distro of choice was mainly performance; Tiny Core is designed to mostly run directly from RAM, which is great for performance, especially on old systems. The minimum CPU it can boot on is an Intel 486DX, a CPU originally released back in 1989. Despite supporting systems almost 35 years old, Tiny Core still works with plenty of modern apps, including the latest version of Firefox. Not all regular Linux apps are accessible, though, as Tiny Core uses specially compiled "extensions" instead of the regular packages you'd use on almost any other distro.

    YouTube playing on the 780.

    For a PC originally released in 2009, the performance is fantastic. While you're not going to be playing many modern games on it, the speed on the web is almost as fast as my main PC. 1080p YouTube plays without any lag, Discord runs fine, and even live TV streaming is smooth. One minor issue in my monitor, which is a little squished on the horizontal at 1280x1024. Maybe I'm just too used to widescreen monitors, though.

    There's still some upgrades that'd be nice to have, such as faster RAM (current stick is DDR3 1066MHz, but I probably have 1333MHz or 1600MHz somewhere in my RAM collection) but overall, I'm very happy with the setup.

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