Dell Optiplex 780 Refurbishment - 05/04/17
I found this computer discarded with only its motherboard, optical drive, and processor installed. The system was very clean and looked as though it had never been used; this was probably because one of the internal components had been defective and had thus caused the disposal of the entire unit. I brought this system home and put in it a 400 watt power supply, 8gb of DDR3 1333MHz memory, 2 1tb samsung hard drives, a card reader, and a second optical drive. I also swapped out its original Intel Core 2 Duo (3.00ghz 6mb cache) with an Intel Core 2 Quad (2.4ghz 8mb cache). After booting it up and installing Ubuntu Linux, I proceeded to install a USB 3.1 card, a USB 3.0 card, a firewire card, and a sound card into its PCI slots. For my uses, I have not really found that the computer needs an additional video card. I also ran tests to ensure that the motherboard, memory, and hard drive were working correctly, which they were. As of April 2017, this machine now operates as my main desktop PC, and adequately performs all of the tasks for which I use it.
This computer has served me really well with very few problems: the internal components appear to be made of the highest quality parts; this includes the motherboard capacitors. Sometimes, motherboard power filter capacitors are known to fail and cause system instability/overheating.
The computer has a decent level of expansion capability, with two 5.25inch external bays, 1 3.5inch external bay, and two internal hard drive bays. All drives connect by SATA and the two hard drives can be configured for RAID 0 or 1 operation. The motherboard features four RAM slots, all of which are, in my instance, filled with 2gb sticks.
A notable caveat with this machine is that, similar to any other Dell computer, it has very proprietary mounting sleds for the hard drives. The optical drives are also mounted with non-standard screws, spares of which are quite hard to find.
Overall, I think that this is, currently, quite likely the best Dell computer which I have used: it features a very good level of compatability, even with modern components and can give a pleasing user experience, both with software and hardware.