Rant: Had to pick between a used Dell Optiplex or building from scratch for a client

This guy came in last week with a $300 budget for a basic office PC. I was stuck between grabbing a refurb Optiplex off eBay or piecing together a cheap AMD build with parts from Micro Center. I went with the Optiplex because I figured it was less headache and I could slap in a cheap SSD. Now I'm dealing with a weird power issue where it won't boot after 8 hours idle, and I'm wishing I just spent the extra afternoon building something fresh. Has anyone else had these random gremlins with old office PCs?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_phoenix3d ago

Oh man, I was totally in your shoes a few months back. I used to swear by those old Optiplex machines for budget builds, like they were bulletproof or something. Then I had one that would randomly drop its Ethernet connection every Tuesday afternoon, no joke. That one experience completely flipped my thinking, I'll take a fresh build with some patience over chasing down a used PC's weird little ghosts any day now.

sean1192d ago

3 different Optiplex boards I've had all bricked within a year of each other lol. @the_phoenix is right, chasing used PC gremlins just isn't worth the headache anymore. Fresh build every time for me now.