Dell Support Centre - Dell Optiplex incompatible system

Thanks. I never quite used it until I got it installed on my XPS and found it to somewhat useful anyway its not critical and your reply saves me wasting more time trying to install it on the lab computers.

Interesting reply, however, it does not address the overall question.  Is Dell Support Center compatible with the Optiplex systems?  My wife has one of these systems and is looking for a tool to check her problems associated with a memory warning..... that she is running out of memory, etc.  I have Dell Support Center on my Inspiron, and love the "details" it provides on all the various aspects of the system.  

If Dell Support Center is not compatible with the Optiplex systems, what is available for such use as described above?

Thats the thing, it seems to be only available for the home computers. Such as the Dimension, Inspiron, Studio and XPS.

The Optiplex, Latitude and Precision are business computers. Interestingly so is the Vostro...

I would guess the description here has something to do with it. The Vostro is meant to be the simplier one, with no dedicated I.T. (similar to the home systems). The Optiplex ones are designed for large organisations with managed IT, hence they have people that "know what they are doing" and Dell has deemed support centre unecessary for such systems. Whereas the Dell Precision have next Business Day Support.

Therefore I guess thats why the Dell Support Centre only works for the:

• Dimension
• Inspiron
• XPS
• Studio
• Vostro

There seems to be no other equivalent free program for the Optiplex system that I know of offered by Dell.

The memory warning is in XP, Vista or 7? Is it to do with RAM/physical memory/pagefile or hard disc space?

Thank you for the response.  We have bought several of the Optiplex computers from a refurbisher that is Dell authorized.  I would presume that is the reason that he has so many of these computers, is that he bought quite a few from businesses that had them networked.  They are great little computers for home however!

That is not what I wanted to hear about the tool not being available for Optiplex, however, understood.

The error message has just started coming up within the past two days, and from what she has told me, it is simply about running out of virtual memory, as she has expanded that.  I am not sure of the actual message.  They system runs XP.  Nothing about the hard drive that she has told me.

Seems like you want to try using the Dell Diagnostics. Power down your system and hold F12 while powering it up, run the diagnostics and see if anything bad is reported about the RAM/Hard drive.

Virtual Memory has nothing to do with problems with the system memory, so support center wouldn't help you anyway.  If you are getting Virtual Memory messages, you are either running out of hard drive space, your virtual memory settings are too low, or (most likely) you have too little memory installed for the applications you are trying to run.  Crucial will give you a good idea what you might be able to upgrade to, but if you provide your model number, we'll be able to tell you if what you see on Crucial is correct, as well as any other "gotchas" to watch out for.

Yeah I wanted to put it on my lab computer anyway nothing we can really do about it if the system is unsupported.

I would need to know more about the system, how much memory it has, etc. before looking at it further.

However you may want to look at the www.crucial.com to see if you can put more in. I would recommend having at least 2 GB on XP.

The computer is a OptiPlex SX280 Desktop with 2G RAM installed. The hard drive is 160GB. I have found the 4G on Crucial, two sticks of 2G each.  What I was trying to find is which stick, if it is RAM, has gone bad, as she has a replacement.  I would presume the only available method is to do what tech support had me do on my Inspirion Laptop, pull one stick out and see if it boots, if it does, then it is probably the stick that was pulled out.  However, I would also presume to go ahead and test the other stick as well, to see if it may good also, and then that would point to a different problem?

I will suggest that to her when she gets home.  I appreciate the responses!  I am amazed that I have been buying Dells online, new, from here as well as refurbished for years and never joined the community until yesterday!  I am not sure if she has tried this or not, but I will suggest it to her, and if we run into something we don't understand, I will post here in this thread.

A computer may even with bad RAM, so diagnostics is the best way to determine if you have a problem with your memory.  However, bad RAM will not be the cause of the Virtual Memory message ... check your Virtual Memory settings to make sure you have it set to a static amount of the Windows recommended amount (usually 1.5x the amount of physical memory = 3GB in your case).

The original specs for the SX280 says it has two slots, with a max of 1GB supported per slot = 2GB max RAM.  The Intel 915G chipset in the SX280 supports 8GB (with 4 slots) and Crucial lists 4GB as the max on this system.  So, although there is a good chance 2GB DIMM's will work, there is a chance they will not.

Good luck.

No problem ... just keep in mind that Virtual Memory requires that much space on the hard drive, so by setting Virtual Memory (Page File) from 1GB to 3GB, you will have 2GB less disk space.  If you get below 10% free space on your drive, you will need to start some preventative maintenance.

Good luck.