Dell OptiPlex 7040 Review

Why you shouldn’t buy a Dell OptiPlex 7040 – an honest review of the Dell OptiPlex 7040. I just wanted to warn people not to buy a Dell OptiPlex 7040 after the terrible experience I had with mine. Here’s my storey.

I bought a Dell OptiPlex 7040 for my company (I’m the System Engineer) because I wanted to buy a business PC so the hardware all worked nicely without issues, instead of buying a custom made PC which would have been faster / cheaper but potentially less reliable. Unfortunately, I will likely never get to review the performance or reliability of the Dell OptiPlex 7040 because of the horror of setting it up.

After starting up the Dell OptiPlex 7040, I found the standard bloatware that you get with all preinstalled business PCs, albeit not that much bloatware, but some. I decided to reinstall the operating system because I purchased the Dell OptiPlex 7040 with 2 hard drives with RAID. They weren’t set up as RAID drives, so I had to change this in the BIOS and reinstall.

Upon reinstalling using an OEM disk I had from a previous purchase, I realised that the Dell OptiPlex 7040 doesn’t come with a license for the OS I bought preinstalled. So I had to use the “Windows 10 recovery disk” that ships with the Dell OptiPlex 7040.

After booting off the Windows 10 recovery disk (it has a Windows 10 boot environment), which gives you the option to restore Windows Vista – instead of Windows 7 or 10, it then fails saying that the disk is locked. I tried changing to numerous different settings on the BIOS for RAID (including a RAID 1 volume that I set up, AHCI mode and reverting the BIOS to the factory defaults and BIOS default options), but no luck. I was able to install Windows 7 off my Windows 7 disk.

Time to review Dell’s support of the Dell OptiPlex 7040… I contacted support on their website and decided to use the chat feature. I got a sales guy who gave me a link to the support page that had chat on it. I thanked him and started the support chat, which then connected me straight back to the same guy. I told him I would try the support phone number instead and that I’d chat to him soon. I couldn’t resist the crack 🙂

I decided not to call support, instead I thought I’d try to download a new Windows 10 recovery CD from the website (there’s actually the option to get a Windows 7 or Windows 10 recovery disk from the website). Downloading a recovery disk was not easy as initially Dell made enter the service tag number for the Dell OptiPlex 7040, then install a program that checks if I’m using that Dell PC (I assume, from the name of the program). Why you would have to download a recovery DVD from a machine you are trying to recover, is beyond me. Anyway, I write this review as the download happens – after several refreshes and retries, the download started. Unfortunately, I doubt my download will ever be successful because the Dell website says that the download will be available for 60 minutes, and it seems that the download takes 3 hours as it appears that they have capped the download speed.

Here concludes my review of the Dell OptiPlex 7040. Summary: Don’t buy Dell computers.