I would give the Flash Drive a try, if it doesn't work then you will have to use a Disc.  However as this is a 10 year old product and Flash Drives were not around back then it may require the disc.  You probably should create both the Flash Drive and a DVD Win 10 to have whatever will be needed.

Although Win 10 may work OK, Officially Dell does not support Win 10, only XP, Vista and Win 7 for drivers.

Thanks fireberd I will burn Windows 10 ISO to a DVD just in case I need it when doing the fresh install.

Its going to be interesting if the USB Windows install wont work. We shall see. 

With regards to USB flash drives, no problem using with the Optiplex and also the wireless dongle for the wireless mouse set up no problems at all. 

Cheers

There may not be any problem using a USB Flash drive in Windows, but there may be issues trying to boot from one.  

I don't work for Dell I am self tort on my PC knowledge there was a time when I didn't know anything. Now I can apply thermal paste which I was scared of doing incase I did it wrong. I modified the cpu fan in my dell 760 sff with a none dell fan with know bleeps I got rid of the hdd caddy and fan and just linked the yellow wire from the cpu fan to the hdd fan sockect.

Fitted a small laptop hdd got a quiet cpu fan my Dell is almost silent and it doesn't get hot inside the case because there is plenty of room now where as before it was jammed.

The small heatsink I fitted a copper base to it with thermal paste between the heatsink and copper base. It is now similar to the cpu heatsink that as a copper base. I replaced the sticky dried out thermal pad and used thermal paste.

Never had any issues with heat causing problems. I don't use the pc for games just normal everyday stuff the cpu goes up to about 59c if I convert a mp4 to dvd but that's the only time it gets a little bit warm.

A lot of people say that the Dell 760 and older versions won't run windows 10 and windows 7 was the last operating system the 760 would run.

Well let me tell you muppets I have a Dell 760 sff and it ran the first edition and it still runs the latest version of windows 10 with no issues at all.

My system is

8GB DDR 2 RAM

Core 2 Duo E7400 Processor

No video card

I have dual monitor set up using VGA & Display Port.

Also I installed window 10 on a Dell GX 620 with a Pentium D Processor with 2GB DDR2 RAM and that run windows 10 without any issues it wasn't slow or anything.

Yea my Dell 760 is about 11 years old Ive had it for about 4 years touch wood never had any issues with any operating system.

So if you have an old pc or laptop try putting windows 10 on it and give it a go it will save you loads of money on buying a new pc.

Hi windows 10 will install either from usb or iso I have done it on my dell 760 sff and it worked. The only issue I had was the pci driver was missing so I used a pci driver for windows 8 and it worked. Also even with the pci driver missing any video cards still worked.

I don't use any video cards now I just use vga and display port to run my dual monitor set up with no issues.

Hope this as helped.