XPS 435 Owners Thread

The problem with the power-supply (a different thread, here: http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19276236/19537427.aspx?PageIndex=1) is not a problem of "wattage", but compatibilty with UPS units.

Apparently, as-of a few months ago, there were MAJOR problems with XPS 435T 9000 working with garden-variety UPS units.  As soon as the UPS kicked-in (no matter the wattage), the 435T shut off!  Some people were lucking-out, able to use the budget UPS units (like I have), but most on that thread did not seem so lucky.

My 435T is still on-order, BTW.  Just wondering "what I'm in for".  I'm hoping that Dell went with a more robust PSU in the last couple of months...

Been working with Support the past hour and a half and awaiting them to call back now. running a pile of tests which completed all the memory tests w/o a hitch then the Dell Diagnostics Screen will run hit any key to continue appeared, I hit enter and got a GRUB Hard Disk Error and everything halted............

Well they asked me to reload BIOS A-13, reseat the hard drive and rerun the tests so I did and got the same GRUB Hard Disk Error when Dell Diagnostics went to run so they're shipping me a new hard drive...............

Upgraded from A09 to A13 on my 435T. I ran the update from Win7 RC1. The update stalled at 2% for a long time but then completed successfully and the system boots up slightly faster now. Regarding PSU, there is a faint beeping/wheezing noise even the computer is turned off. Anyone else have the same issue?

I sure wish there was a databse of failed vs succesful updates to 13. Still no way I a trying it. Way to risky.

Cosmos, Did you check the BIOS settings? I had a similar result after I installed A13. Went into the BIOS and found that it was set to check BOTH my DVD drives on startup. Re-set it to only the top one and the speed increased some. I've since found some INTERESTING data in the EVENT VIEWER (on my Vista 64 bit at least, not sure it is in all versions?). Open up APPLICATION AND SERVICES LOGS --> MICROSOFT ---> WINDOWS --> DIAGNOSTICS-PERFORMANCE --> OPERATIONAL... these appear to be BOOT and SHUTDOWN PERFORMANCE monitors. 100 to 199 are BOOT data, above that, SHUTDOWN... Take a look at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=246 and check out the link in the middle, "Want to see how your computer measures up? Click here for step-by-step instructions with detailed illustrations.", it is very interesting reading. All the 100 entries are the actual boot timings, over 100 to 199, various warnings and errors. It appears an occasional >100 isn't a problem but constant ones are. Also look at the BOOTDEGRATION flag. Mine are mostly FALSE but I have a few TRUE's too, although even with a true, the timings are sometimes shorter than those with FALSE? Go figure? This is the data from this mornings boot (for comparison purposes) : ==================================== xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ============================== I'm not even sure what to make of this data though, other than to get the boot times Vista thinks it took? The >100 warnings/errors however are useful if I get a lot of the same. So far, random ones and never seem to constantly repeat. Irv S.

Irv,

That LIST gave me a HUGE headache!!!! LOL!!! :emotion-42:

I just timed my boot-up again...2min 41sec. Ridiculous that my time got worse with the Bios update! And I don't think I can get into setup to look at the Bios settings either, as the keyboard is not loaded up yet and is in-operable! Is there any other way to get into the setup settings other than at system startup?

Yes, I have long suspected that. But I really love this keyboard in every way!

I can't even be bothered to get another usb keyboard to test it out

Cosmos,

Irv, That LIST gave me a HUGE headache!!!! LOL!!! :emotion-42: I just timed my boot-up again...2min 41sec. Ridiculous that my time got worse with the Bios update! And I don't think I can get into setup to look at the Bios settings either, as the keyboard is not loaded up yet and is in-operable! Is there any other way to get into the setup settings other than at system startup?

I'd go and get a cheap keyboard and customize the BIOS, but it possibly didn't change in your case since you never 'customized' it if you could never get int.

As bad as the data looked that I posted, I'd look at the warnings/error between 100 and 200 (101 to 199) and see if there are repeating one often. That would nail down possibly the cause of a slow boot.

The worst offender I had was SMSSinit, the Session Manager Init, and it caused up to a 35 second delay. I've had 12 of them since I got the system. No pattern at all. Delay ranged from 5 to 35 seconds. My most recent boot took 102 seconds and Explorer delayed it by 6 seconds. Since I got the computer I've had 344 boots ranging from 65 seconds to 255 seconds. Most in the 70's. Some had to be longer as updates were installed I assume. Some had multiple entries during the boot process with identified degradation causes. Worth looking at I'd say.

Hey,

I just got my 435MT last week and I'm getting the PSU swapped on Monday due to a very annoying clicking noise when powered on and the two internal fans are being swapped out TMPIN0 runs at 70 degrees when the system in idle, which apparently *according to XPS support* isn't expected.

So once all thats sorted, I gonna start looking to mod up my 435MT.. got a 4890 on the shelf waiting to go in it :emotion-4:.  ...

1. Does anyone know if a 150x150 PSU fits inside these things?  From the pictures I'd say so, considering the original is 150x140, just curious if anyone else has done it?
2. Has anyone fitted an intake fan at the front of a 435MT.. I'm going to take a look this evening to see what can be done, need to really get the air flow up

Cheers,

K

New drive arrived and it's installed, took a little over an hour to load the image preloaded on it then booted to Vista and got an immediate BSOD, figured the 1505 wireless, ATI or X-Fi Extreme more than likely the cause so I began the download and took it one at a time and the PC froze twice during downloading.

When it came up it was stuck at the black screen forever and had to force it down, bringing it back online met with the same fate so I rebooted in Safe Mode and it reported it recovered from a serious error so I did a Restart and less than 30 seconds BSOD A Clock Interrupt was not received on a seconday processor etc... etc..

Having read about this problem in another post here I revisited and saw the OP had to set the Multiprocessor in BIOS from ALL to 1 so I wrote this down and tried a fresh boot. Same BSOD!! Restarted and changed BIOS to 1 from ALL and it's beeen running fine ever since. I've done all the driver upgrades, security updates and SP2 load but have not restored any of my programs since I can't see why this righ can't run as it's supposed to, i.e. ALL processors engaged.... back to tech support tomorrow I guess.... sigh

I sure wish there was a databse of failed vs succesful updates to 13. Still no way I a trying it. Way to risky.

I'm debating whether to apply this BIOS update. Have there really been many problems with it? Is it really necessary for Windows 7?

Restarted and changed BIOS to 1 from ALL and it's beeen running fine ever since.

* Where in the bios do you see this?

Just to verify it didn't miraculously fix itself I reset it to ALL and BSOD followed about 40 seconds after Vista loaded, it's been set back to 2 again.

Chris,

     Advanced BIOS Features > Choose Multi Core (the options are DEFAULT=ALL, 2 and 1 ) I chose 1 and have since changed it to 2 and it's still running