Dell Optiplex 7050 Intel i7 Micro Desktop

Dell Optiplex 7050 Intel i7 Micro Desktop

Does anyone know how much room the Windows installation takes up and how much usable space is on the 512GB/1TB SSD?

I believe Win10 takes a little over 30GB, incl updates. Some space will be taken up by Dell’s software image too. This looks like a decent, basic work computer.
However, Windows 10 end of life is currently set for Oct 2025. That means you can still use Windows 10, but there will be no more security updates. This can make your computer vulnerable to bad chaps that want to hack/exploit your device.

I do believe there is a way to get Win 11 to install on so called “unsupported” hardware. So it’s not like your machine will be unusable after 2025.

yup, I’ve installed it on some old 3rd gen I3 boxes and old AMD phenoms following this guideEasiest Way to Install Windows 11 ON Anything!!! Funny thing is that I still prefer Windows 10

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Windows 10/11 is about 25-30GB + a hibernation file which is roughly = GB to GB of your amount of RAM

My desktop takes up roughly ~100GB. I have windows 10 and 64GB of RAM. The hibernation file takes up a considerable amount of space, depending on the installed amount of RAM. A lot of times people can’t find what’s taking up a bunch of space on their computer and the hibernation file is to blame (for PCs with a lot of RAM, anyways)

For most machines, you can expect ~450GB/500GB and ~950GB/1TB

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I generally turn off hibernation on desktops to get rid of that hiberfile.sys and free up the space… with the fast processors and SSD drives these days, computers boot up fast enough that hibernation isn’t really all that beneficial to me. It kinda makes sense for laptops, but then just putting them to sleep generally works, unless you only use it a few times a month.

You can open a command prompt as administrator and enter ‘powercfg -H off’ to turn if off quick if you want…

I did not say it would be unusable, I said there wouldn’t be any more security updates.

I watched the video. I especially liked the part where he says “I don’t recommend using this on a system you use every day. We don’t know what the future of unsupported hardware is gonna be with Windows 11.”

Definitely always an option, I have mine off myself, just took a general IT approach and didn’t want to get into cmd/terminal commands. Had to when I upgraded my ram and my boot drive was almost completely full. Same way I found out about what it was. At first I thought I had one of those viruses that just keeps generating and duplicating files to fill up your system.

My power options are just turn off display , I don’t even let mine sleep, it’s either on or off xD

Yeah- I should have prefaced that- but personally the browser accounts for most my critical transactions, and really I don’t see a reason they would have to limit functionality. Once you get it installed, you might have issues with certain drivers and need to use some legacy drivers (assuming you get them to work). But if all goes well on the install and everything seems stable, I don’t foresee that they would purposefully blacklist any components. I think the the purpose of creating the limitations for the install of Windows 11 is that they want to guarantee the experience based on modern hardware. But you’re right I should have said do this at your own risk, but they cover that in the video.

Thanks mates. That’s about what I figured. My goal was to just use this as a Plex server. May suit it’s needs for that purpose.

It typically TPM 2.0 compatibility issue, which is some minor security risks, but security risks nonetheless. If you are mindful of your web browsing and downloads you should be fine as long as you keep windows defender up to date. There are a lot of people who download torrents that have backdoor viruses/crypto miners/other malicious software baked in, most of the time silent, who go above and beyond to secure their system.

It’ll work, though 7th gen added hardware decoding support for VP9, so you may want to target that instead.