Dell Optiplex 745 and all puppies fail

[Karl Godt]

for £20 each...

That would make around 25€ .

Such 2nd hand Optiplex are sold around 130-250 € here in shops. The price mostly depends on RAM size.
My are fair solid.
HDDs were running for another 12 month with much rsync, mksquashfs and make.
Have replaced/upgraded them after that time just in case.

Serious problem had with untight speaker and fan cable joint ends to the board ( no sound or fan sometimes did not run ) .

They have memory check in the BIOS.

As ally says : Check the memory bar(s) .
The smaller Optiplex seems to need pairs of memory bars.

[oldland-dog]

Hi all. Came across this post by accident while looking up another problem. I have a cupboard full of 745's SFF all destined for charity.

Using a tested CD drive I can not get Slacko 5.3 or Wary 5.3 to boot. It says 'Searching for puppy files... pausing...puppy_slacko_5.3.3.sfs not found. Dropping out to initial-ramdisk console...

The Ubuntu live disk loads no problem and I can boot puppy when it is pre-installed on a hard drive. I would also note that when Ubuntu is installed on the hard drive I find that the computer overheats unless I swith the SATA Operation to Legacy in the BIOS. This also helps for booting Freedos for flashing the BIOS.

620 SFF no probs. I'll have a look around for a 755 see what it does.

About 80% of our Fells need there Capacitors replaced.

Jon

Edit: Yep 755 same problem but no probs with 780.