XPS 2710 (mid 2012) and Windows 10

Well, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it.  I decided to have one more go at this pathetic 2710.  I'm posting this in case someone else may benefit from it.  My opinion of DELL hasn't change Rohe and it won't.  DELL not supporting a system they sold as top of the line and cutting edge at such a price is not how responsible companies treat their customers.  At least not the ones that want to stay in business.  Also, I hardly feel it is likely that Microsoft has released a killer operating system that is taking out computers all over the world.  I think that would make the news.  Perhaps Windows 10 is just targeting DELL computers :-O.    

My system was running Windows 8.1, not Windows 10.  Before the black screen of death showed up it was starting to take longer and longer for it to boot.  Eventually the black screen was all I got anymore.  I tried resetting the CMOS using the jumper, pulling out anything that I could memory, hard drive cables, CDROM cables, wireless NIC etc.  I always got the 2 beeps when I pulled out all the memory so I knew it was getting somewhere into the POST.  Every once in a great while it would decide to boot all the way into the OS which took about 4 minutes.  However, if I turned it off again we were back to the black screen.  One odd thing I noticed was that if I kept activating the touch buttons on the lower right that control the HDMI or Computer screen I would see a strange white bar in the middle of the screen with the number 10 in front of it and the numbers 3-9 after it.  It is hard to see as you need to keep rapidly activating the buttons and it appears for only a split second, barely enough time to see what it is.

For my last go I decided to get the last BIOS update DELL released for this system.  I had never updated the BIOS which I believe was at version 6, their last being 12 I think. I put that on a thumb drive and plugged it in.  Then I just kept resetting the BIOS, putting in only one memory card, and restarting the system.  Light some candles and hop around the room on one foot while swinging a black cat over your head.  Whatever it takes to get your DELL computer to come to life one more time. Then flash the BIOS from an Administrator level DOS window.  Ever since I have done that the system has been working normally.  

So, in my case at least, there is absolutely no doubt that the BIOS became corrupt.  Since a flash memory BIOS is basically a magnetic storage medium but supposedly non-volatile I can only conclude that the BIOS code was somehow weakened and could be read sometimes if you tried enough times.  So, re-writing the BIOS code back into the flash memory of the BIOS chip has made it readable again.  This explains the black screen and everything else.  If your BIOS isn't readable then your computer can't initialize anything.  Since, so many seem to describe the exact same symptoms I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't the cause of most of everyone's problems with this computer.  I've been doing hardware, everything from Mainframes, Super Minis, Sun Microsystems, some systems few have ever heard of, every type of peripheral device and hard drive imaginable (when you actually repaired things) for the past 36 years.  I have seen similar problems with magnetic media on disk drives.  Long ago we had a program at one place I worked that looked for weak spots on hard drives, continuously read it until it got  a good read and then wrote the information back so that the magnetic information was stronger and more readable.  A similar old commercial product called SpinRite was around for a while for smaller hard drives.  For this DELL 2710 I went from sometimes getting it to boot to the login screen after 4 minutes and NEVER seeing the DELL logo to the following.

DELL Logo - see that at 8 seconds from power on.

Login Screen - see that at 31 seconds from power on.

Logging In - takes me about 10 seconds, but I do have a lot of stuff getting started.

Also, if you don't know how to create a system image from the built in Windows software I suggest you Google it.  Buy yourself a Passport drive from Best Buy and just do it.  If you have that you can restore your entire system to a new hard drive or even a different computer if necessary.

I'll keep the 2710 around as a toy but never again will I buy an AIO or any high dollar DELL products.  I have already moved on and built my own behemoth of a system from a Corsair 900D case that will run whatever OS I want to put on it and that I will be able to upgrade when I need to.  I love the ASUS motherboards.  If I need to flash a BIOS chip on their boards (and they have 2) I can just plug a USB stick into it and press a button.  It only needs to have power, it doesn't even need a CPU installed to do that.