XPS 435 Owners Thread

Thanks, wrote DELL Customer Service to find out what's going on as it also said my Support was expired, the box came today and has a 3 year coverage..........

I've had my 435 for a couple of months now.  I recently had my card reader 'disappear'.  I am getting the 'unrecognized USB device' message so I know the system still sees it. I've seen several people in this owners thread report that they had their card reader disappear also but I haven't seen any real solutions.  I think it is a Realtek 5151 or something like that.  Please help.  Thanks!

Could you please post the link for this information and the website, thanks!

I ordered my 435T on 2/28 and received it on 3/14.  Mine has the 4670, 3GB RAM, 500GB Seagate hard drive.  I've added two more hard drives and another 3GB of RAM.  I am extremely pleased with the system.  The only issues I've experienced are a disappearing media card reader, a misaligned front bezel which caused my SD cards to fall behind the bezel, and an optical drive that requires a hard button push to open.  Minor quibbles. I am running Windows 7 x64 on it and it runs great.  Everything works.  A great system!

Did you figure out how to get the card reader to 're-appear'.  I am having the same issue.

I had a blue screen error that was fixed by updating the card reader controller driver. Maybe it will work for this issue?

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=15&PFid=25&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Anyone who bought a 435T after June 1 with Vista 64 supposedly qualifies for a free upgrade to Windows 7 after it's released. When I go through the registration it pre qualifies you based on pc model and OS then when I give the service tag for the 435T purchase 8 Aug with Vista 64 I get told my system doesn't qualify, anyone have any luck with this? Thanks..............

It's supposed to be after June 26.

Had no problem registering mine, though I think I initally went in under the XPS430 when I didn't see the Studio XPS435 listed differently. Looks like it was ultimately the Service Tag that matters most.

If you just recently purchased, I'd give it a bit to get into the system before panicking. It doesn't ship until October anyway. Just keep trying.

I've had my 435 for a couple of months now.  I recently had my card reader 'disappear'.  I am getting the 'unrecognized USB device' message so I know the system still sees it. I've seen several people in this owners thread report that they had their card reader disappear also but I haven't seen any real solutions.  I think it is a Realtek 5151 or something like that.  Please help.  Thanks!

I initially had it disappear when I fresh installed and couldn't get it back.

Ended up downloading the latest drivers direct from Realtek. It's the RTS5151 card reader. You can find compatible drivers on the page they have for the RTS5101 / RTS5111 / RTS5116 models.

Installing the latest drivers didn't do anything, but when I *uninstalled* them, Windows seemed to suddenly magically know on its own there was a card reader there and handle it appropriately.

Realtek has issued even more recent drivers in just the last week or so (version 6.1.7600.30101), but since it's currently not broken for me, I'm not messing with it again just yet.

http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=15&PFid=25&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

For what it's worth, they do make the integrated Ethernet controller, too (RTL8168C), and I believe I've noticed benefit from installing the drivers they keep releasing for that as well. Version 7.005 just came out today. I believe they're releasing Windows 7 compatible things currently in particular (which also work with Vista).

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Well, since I (and Dell) seem to be at a loss on this issue I thought I'd try you folks again. I have a 435T shipped 7/10/09. 2 640GB HDs configured as RAID 1, 6GB RAM, it originally arrived with the A09 BIOS, but in troubleshooting Dell made me change it to A07 (and now nobody at Dell seems to have any access to a BIOS version above the A07 so I guess I'm stuck there.)

The issue: I have 3 external USB drives (2 Seagate Freeagents and a Western Digital). Although in the BIOS I set the USB drives to disabled, removable drives disabled, Intel RAID array the 1st boot drive and CD/DVD the second, that configuration changes constantly all by itself. The only way to make this thing boot is to press F12 during POST and manually selecting the RAID array which is at the bottom of the list.

Why does this BIOS insist on placing an external USB drive in the 1st boot drive position irregardless of how the user specifies the boot order? Dell has replaced the motherboard (same A07 BIOS) and that had no effect other than to slow the general boot process down some (thanks Dell). This problem can't be drivers or VISTA because it occurs when attempting to boot the OS. The OS never gets control prior to the problem occuring. It can't be RAM, once booted there are no system or HD problems. I think it is a logic flaw in the BIOS that doesn't properly know how to handle external USB drives.

Please, anyone else experienced this? Any thoughts? Thanks in advance for your help.

I think this is what happened to me the other day and what I was asking about in my other post. It has only happned once so far in the 2 weeks I have had the system but it did seem like it was trying to boot from a CD and then a USB drive I had hanging on the system. I am at BIOS A11 that came with the system and it has only done it once for me. If Dell will get you A11 maybe it will at least reduce the issue and then we know it is BIOS related or at least addressable.

XPS 435's still being delayed? Original order date 8/9/2009. Estimated delivery date 8/20/2009. Update 8/14/2009 new estimated delivery date 8/27/2009.

1 week delay so far.

Has anyone found a fix for the 'disappearing' card reader - here's another example of the issue I'm having.  I didn't do a fresh install though.  Mine just disappeared.  System still sees it - I have an unknown USB device in Device Manager.  I tried the drivers on the CD but that didn't work.

Yes I have found the solution to the disappearing card reader for my case. Dell tech service could not solve this issue.

In my case, I pulled the power cord off the PSU. Not just turn it off - that won't work. Pull the power cord off and wait a few minutes (I guess to clear the capacitors in the system). Then plug the cord back in and power up. Voila for me! The card reader appeared again!

Well. mine arrived on Thursday and our heatwave arrived on Friday. I got a 435T, i7 965 @ 3.2 GHz, 9 Gb RAM, 1.5 Tb Sata, DVD/RW and Blu-ray combo drive, 1000/NIC and 1505 wireless, XFi Extreme Soundblaster, ATI Radeon 4870 1024, Dell USB keyboard and mouse, Vista 64 Premium and am EIZO 21.5" LCD.

Out of the box it came and opened it up to verify nothing amiss from the shipping gorillas :) and all appeared A OK. Set the system up in the kitchen and fired it up and in an hour and fifteen minutes Vista 64 accounted for 5 BSOD's....... sigh......... I had spent 3 days gearing up for delivery and cleaning up my XPS 600 for the takeover which included burning a DVD copy of Windows 7 RC 1 build 7100 to see how I would like it.

Rebooted the PC and knew I'd only have about 10 minutes before the next BSOD so I quickly shrunk the drive for the W7 RC1 OS, placed the DVD in the drive and rebooted to the DVD. I have to say W7 RC1 is the fastest load of a Microsoft OS I have ever seen and in under 3 hours from starting the load it had intuitively found my wireless network, requested access and the 128 bit WEP encryption key and captured 70 Gb of files off of my XPS 600 and 2 XPS Gen 1 3.4 GHz Extreme laptops (one with a USB Network Drive) and once completed the 2 email accounts I have on Outlook 2003 were completely populated including contacts and all my calendar information, bookmarks in IE and Firefox, all my MS Office Excel, Access, FrontPage, Powerpoint and Word doc's, photos and multimedia objects all intact, never saw anything like it.

At 8:30 Friday evening it experienced a BSOD and shut itself down and restarted to take corrective action. Loaded all updated drivers from Microsoft, Logitech, ATI, Cyberlink, RealTek, EIZO, Canon and HP then all the MS Security upgrades. I then loaded Lightroom 2 and Capture NX2 and other software. Downloaded all the various tests and ran 5 in the background for 8 hours straight w/o incident. I then began playing with overclocking the 4870 and it has been stable for 48 hours running the GPU at 775 MHz and the Memory Clock at 950 MHz with all the stress tests running in the background an additional 8 hours. The only things W7 RC1 didn't like was being wired to the Belkin pre N Router which was replaced with a Belkin N+ which allows my Maxtor USB Network Drive to really be a Network drive and my Logitech WebCam which has also been replaced.

Once past the initial Vista BSOD cluster this has been a happy machine that is a pleasure to use and I will convert to final release of Windows 7 when I get it shipped to me, hoping that a few pieces of software that aren't compliant as yet will be after final release but not a big deal if they aren't, happy member of the community of 435T owners!

banjo

That's great that you finally received yours. Mine is delayed, and after having read your post and "Rebooted the PC and knew I'd only have about 10 minutes before the next BSOD " I don't know if I should expext much. Is the inference that XPS 435's are going to BSOD right out of the box, no matter what? Or were your expectations based on your particular setup? It's pretty fightening!!!

Is the inference that XPS 435's are going to BSOD right out of the box, no matter what? Or were your expectations based on your particular setup? It's pretty fightening!!!