Dell XPS 8700 freezes

I've spent about 20 hours on the phone on this already. I think it should be up to Dell to acknowledge the hardware issue and fix this for us. Interested in sharing a request to Dell on Twitter?

Hey, Matthew. While my XPS was crashing and I kept rebooting it, a driver update from Dell popped up for the Intel motherboard.  I installed that.  Rebooted the computer.  It froze again.  Then I got another automatic update for the USB driver from Dell.  I installed that and the PC hasn't frozen (although I haven't shut it off since then).  You should see if you can find this Intel motherboard driver and the USB driver updates.  

Of course, I know your frustration that Dell hasn't been able to deal with this problem for two years.  And I'm not sure if this is a solution to the problem.  I could be back to this forum in a couple of months with the same complaint.  But this may give you something to go on. What's your idea about going on Twitter?

My system did the same thing after I installed a new Western Digital 4 gigabyte hard drive.  When I remove this drive the freeze ups go away.

It is not just you and the jedigoddess.  I have the same problems and have come to the same conclusions....reload a straight win 7 disk. Will be doing that soon.  I was actually dumb enough to purchase 2 of these systems. First one I returned as being faulty; just a fluke....never thought it was a system problem. But once I got my second system and had same problems I was really ticked. So I added ram to see if that would help.  No, it freezes gives BSOD and mini pauses many times a day.  I'm going to do a fresh clean load of straight 7 not an 8 rollback. If that does not work it  is out of here.

Is there any way that we can get a wireless replacement card from Dell?

I have being suffering from this problem for about two years since I bought the XPS 8700. 

Can you suggest a wireless card model for us to replace?

I don't want to buy one and get the freezing problem over again. Thanks!

Don't know if wireless card is really the problem.  I ordered my PC with windows 7. Upon delivery I learned it was actually windows 8.1 "rolled back" to perform like windows 7. I constantly had all the problems described within the community on freezing, mini hangs, mysterious reboots etc.  I was literally ready to trash the machine. Then I got an idea.  What if it were actually the "roll back".  So I purchased a win 7 disk off ebay, put in a new hard drive and did a clean install.  Guess what???  MY COMPUTER NOW WORKS PERFECTLY!!! 

If you do this be sure to scan your machine for what hardware you need drivers for as win 7 did not automatically load.  I used dell drivers.  It is important to know what parts are in your pc. Example, Dell keeps trying to give me ATI radeon updates but my box came with a Nvidia card so I don't want or need ATI.

I had the same problem  as the OP many moons ago stated. I have a 6mo old  XPS 8700 32 gig RAm 1 TB,  Nvidia low grade 750 card.  The Bios is A11 and Intel® Management Engine (Intel® ME) version 9.0.5.1367jinstalled. Furthermore  the OS is a clean version of Windows 7 SVP 1. I don't see anything that would be a 8 reverted.  So I went through all of the event logs and nothing major correlated with the freezing issue. I have disabled wireless controller. So I will see if that is the issue. I'll re post if the troubles continue.

@Brenda-Ohio When you re install windows 7 , effectively old drivers are installed to the wireless card. You then  reinstall the wireless drivers. There is too much change to effectively track down what is really going on if you reinstall windows. So it's not necessarily true that it isn't the wireless card's software.

Clearly, People with hard drive problems are a different matter. I don't  have those issues. I checked.

This problem is really bad, costs money and time and puts all my VM work in jeopardy . I have to re install and clean up broken VM's. I will never purchase another Dell desktop or server.

I called Dell out of warranty support at  1-800-288-4410 and asked to be escalated to a manager. He understood the problem and said he would forward to a "level 3 team" and that I should check back in a few months to see if this becomes a known issue.

Wireless card IS DEFINITELY the problem. At least it was for me. I recently purchased a Dell XPS 8700. It worked fine for a while. Then, all of a sudden, it was freezing up all the time. These freezeups were random in nature. It did not matter what I was doing at the time. Sometimes, it froze up a couple of hours after restarting. Sometimes, it froze up within minutes of restarting. Sometimes, I was on the internet. Sometimes, I was not on the internet. I carefully read through all the previous posts on this forum and several others. The one common thread was the wireless card. Then it hit me. Just before the freezeups began, I had unwittingly disabled my Belkin Wireless USB Adapter. At that point, my adapter rightfully stopped functioning and the Dell Internal Wireless Card came into play. That is precisely the time from which the freezes began. So, here is my advice. If you don't already have one, purchase a third-party wireless USB adapter and install it on your computer. Then, follow these steps to disable the Dell Internal Wireless Card (these steps are using Windows 10):

1) From your Apps, find Windows Administrative Tools

2) Under Windows Administrative Tools, find Computer Management

3) From Computer Management, find System Tools

4) From System Tools, find Device Manager

5) From Device Manager, find Network Adapters

6) From Network Adapters, right click on Dell Wireless 1704 and select Disable

That's it! You should now be running minus all the freezeups. Let me know how that works for you.
P.S. I ran all the virus scans and recommended diagnostics before coming to the above conclusion. And yes, I know. It's a shame that we should have to purchase additional hardware to correct this problem, but it sure beats wasting a lot of time on the phone!

Thank you. It is a shame. I'd help escalate this to Dell. I think if we collaborated somehow we could raise enough noise to get this addressed. I talked to a manager and they said they'd escalate this to a "level 3 team". Please contact me if I can help with this. Else we all incur the cost of this faulty product.

With regard to my previous post ("Wireless card IS DEFINITELY the problem"), I should have mentioned that, in addition to running all the virus scans and recommended diagnostics, I also did all the appropriate bios and driver updates before coming to my conclusion. You would want to do that as well, just to be certain that nothing else is amiss.