E4300 locking up

More information is required please

1) Did they act this way out of the box with the baseline Dell install BEFORE you installed anything?

2) What operating system?

3) Is this constant or intermittent?

4) Any errors? Anything in Event Viewer? Do they boot into safe mode?

5) Have you run the PSA test (

Yes my company is also having locking up issues with a number of the E4300 but not the E6400 or E4200. Also problems with HDD noise and stuttering speakers.

We have tried different flavours of OS including XP and Vista with no joy. We have also tried updating all drivers and have even obtained a pre-release BIOS x35 from Dell but they are still locking up.

But we did get Dell to replace the motherboard on 2 units and they have not hung since. Dell are coming back on Monday to replace 3 more so we are beginning to think there is a 'bad batch' of motherboards in certain E4300.

Anyone else having the same issues?

I have Latitude E4300 with Segate 160GB drive. Almost continuous access to hard drive (every 0.8-1.2 secs) in normal and Safe XP mode. Dell (Germany) tells me this is normal for this drive - I cannot understand how this can be so. My thoughts were failing drive but wonder if could be main memory or MB. The noise and flickering disk drive is very frustrating.

Any guidance appreciated - Dell Germany have no machines they can compare against when I contacted them today

We don't use them straight out of the box. We use Acronis to image them if they don't already come with an image installed. We are running XP and they lock up at random times but every day regardless of what we are running as far as applications are concerned. No errors of any kind, they just quit any and all accessibility. We have to do a manual power down to get them running again. It's not a booting problem, but Dell has 2 of them at this time as they witnessed to issue. I'll keep you posted.

Do these E4300s have the solid state drives?

Dell has 2 of the units at this time. We have 1 E4200 with the solid state drive that is not experiencing the lockup issue. We also have 2 E4300s with SATA drives that are running normally. I'll keep you posted.

 I bought 2 e4300's with XP and 160 disk drives. I am having the same lock up issue. Just freezes, no event errors logged, and requires hard reboot. Seems to be random.  Installed a04 bios, didn't help.

Dell replaced the first 2 laptops. I am having the same problem with one of the replacements. I will be requesting another replacment. Don't think they have the bugs worked out of this one yet.

I also have one user with an E4300, using Vista and a 64GB SSD drive.  I assume the unit we got was one of the first, as it was ordered "the day" the E4300s became orderable, though it took several weeks to arrive.

I had my hands on the unit for about a day when it first arrived, and it did lock up on me once (hard freeze requiring a power cycle), before I started modifying the "from factory" configuration (I added Office 2007, updates, and such).  The laptop only froze once while I had it, so I didn't worry too much about it.  At the time there were no newer drivers/BIOS updates available for it.

Now that the laptop has been in the user's hands for many weeks, it locks up on him reportedly "once every few days," and requires the same power cycle to recover.  I was recently having a meeting with this user, and the laptop froze while he was showing me an e-mail on it.  After the power cycle, I perused around in the event logs and such, and there were no errors...I suspect the hardware froze and Vista had no clue.  I didn't take the laptop from him so that I could do extended troubleshooting on it...he depends on the thing and can't live without it.

I'm hesitant to open a support incident with Dell at this point, since the problem is SO intermittent...I foresee a long series of inconvenient tech visits and part swaps, replacing components that are "guesses" of what the problem might be.  I would rather my user suffer through for a bit whilest the issue is rooted out by others (why I checked the forums in the first place, and I'm not surprised to have found others with the same issue).  We've only got the one E4300, so I have nothing to compare it against in person.

FWIW, we did recently get an E4200 with Vista and the same 64GB SSD drive (very similar configuration as the E4300) for a different user, and as far as I know that laptop has never had the freeze issue...during configuration I had it running for probably 48 hours straight (syncing e-mail), and it never blinked.  That laptop has only been in the user's hands for about a week, though.

Jim

Its like extracting blood from a stone, but Dell have confirmed that the problem lays with the intel chipset and that intel are currently working with the vendors such as sony, dell etc to resolve the issue. (although there are no public announcements about this)

Dell are expected to fix this via a A05 BIOS update that is expected first week in 09

I have an E4200 that is experiencing the same issues. It does not need a power cycle to come back but occasionally the thing takes 2-5 minutes to access C: drive, programs etc.

I had contacted dell and tried to remove the Dell Control Point UCM thinking that may be an issue, but there was no way aorund installing it. I have taken this laptop back form the user as it is useless to him.

I am hoping you guys are right about the BIOS fix.

A05 has been released which HOPEFULLY will fix these hanging issues (fingers crossed)

Having the exact same issue with several E4300's.  Updated the bios to A05 and that did not help.  We have several E6400's with the exact same image, and the issue does NOT occur.

The system locks consistently after a few minutes on a screen saver that uses Adobe Flash. 

This is effecting our deployment of E4300's to our entire company.

Groan - we updated all our E4300 this afternoon, 87 in total, with 45 having regular lockup's. But reading your feedback doesnt sound like A05 is going to fix the issue.

We even use Dells Ximage service to image our machines, and as i stated in an ealier post even have this issue on machines that have been built via and XP or Vista CD.

Oh well, looks like i will be ringing my Dell account team tomorrow.

We had one out of eight E4300s (standard SATA hard drives) that locked up solidly on a regular basis.

Even though it passed thorough diagnostics, Dell replaced the motherboard and it's been fine ever since.

Hopefully that's the only problem.

Hi guys,

Looks like I have the same issue as well on a 160gb E4300  - tried updating all drivers and then the bios to A05 but no joy. Still get the lockups, primarily when browising images or video.

Anyone have any last thoughts before i get on to Dell

Coe62