STR Canada: FNET 018 - ///Turbo Board Support 1-41 STR West: FNET 075 - Bloom County BBS 1-41 STR East: FNET 350 - The Bounty ST BBS 1-90 *-= ST REPORT INTERNATIONAL ONLINE MAGAZINE =-* For retro computing they would have been perfect for small format yet high performance Windows 98 rigs if they hadn't all died off with bad caps.ST Report: 25-Oct-91 #742 From: Bruce D. Just badly let down in components sourcing. I kept one of the 745s which still works today.Ī real shame about the caps plague on these - they were well built well designed machines. All the 745s were fine and were sold off, but with only them to shift I just about broke even. Didn't quite work out - I stored them (well) for a year and when I got them out in 2012 every single GX260 went bang on attempting to power up, every single SX270 was either dead or wouldn't post. Thought I'd make a fast buck - I bought them for £20/unit (sans hard drive) and then planned to pick up cheap secondhand 40GB drives to go in them before flopping them out on eBay. I took the lot off the company's hands in 2011 when a new IT system was installed which needed newer hardware (and notably the new solution didn't use Dell - not the only workplace I know of that never bought Dell again after the early 2000's caps debacle). About half had failed in service by 2006 and were chucked and replaced with Optiplex 745s which proved far more reliable. Oh those old Dells and their bad caps :D My workplace bought a load of SFF GX260s around 2002, during 2004 added a load more USFF SX270s. I'd remove it and check if you bent/smashed any of the pins in the socket, which would cause the machine to not boot. I would say that your power supply may be the main culprit for the machine acting erratically, but it could also be the CPU. You'll need to replace ALL capacitors, especially the tiny ones hidden between stuff because those can go very bad and cause all sorts of havoc. A generic ATX power supply can be made to work, but some hacking is required for the long power wire runs and weird connectors. In order to fix your machine, you'll have to completely recap the motherboard AND power supply. the domed top, leaking from the vent or blown out rubber plug in the bottom) They can and do fail without any obvious physical signs of failure. When capacitors fail in these machines (or in general), they don't always show physical symptoms of failure (ie. I replaced 4000+ GX270/280 motherboards back in 2007 as part of a recall by Dell, where they lost a lawsuit over defective motherboards due to faulty capacitors.īut it goes further than that, the power supplies and monitors had these same garbage capacitors and failed just as often. The "Nichicon" / "Rubycon" capacitors on the board are counterfeit and have a 100% failure rate. The Optiplex GX2x0/SX2x0 series was one of the worst affected by the capacitor plague. I have no idea what's wrong now, any ideas? Lots of people say that these models have bad caps, but I examined all of them and they look fine. I would have thought that maybe I screwed up the re-thermal pasting (can't see how), but all the letter lights on the back are green so everything must be good. It turns on but gives me two short garbled sounding beeps then does nothing (these sound different than the regular diagnostic beeps). Now however I can't get the system to boot at all. Once I saw an error message that said the system shutdown due to a thermal event, so I then suspected that the thermal paste on the processor had gone bad and replaced that (it was indeed pretty much dried and caked on). However during all of this I would run into random problems like the system not wanting to boot on occasion (it would turn on, but nothing came up on the monitor). So I ran Memtest86 but all the tests passed. I believe that means that I have some bad memory. I suspected that maybe there was some sort of motherboard error so I downloaded the Dell diagnostics and it confirmed that there was a "memory data bus stress test failure". After that I tried installing Windows XP on it and all was going well until the the system had to reboot to continue the install, after that I got a weird error (can't recall the exact message). The first thing I did was put a new battery in it to get rid of the error message on the boot. There are no cards or anything else in it. It's the full tower model and has 1GB of RAM in it (two 512MB sticks) and a 40GB hard drive. I got an Optiplex GX280 and I've been having issues with it from the get go. Ok so this may be a little new for this forum given it's a P4 and all, but I'm at my wits end with this system and I really want to try and save it.
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