XPS 15 (L502X): General slown down system and excessive disk activity

I have a L702X experiencing similar problems. It has been back to Dell once for service and "CPU" was checked on the repair sheet. But it is still acting up. It quit freezing and requiring hard shutdowns after the repair, but this thing is like using an old 8086 floppy based system. Even as I type this, the screen doesn't respond to my typing for about 10 seconds, then part of the sentence will appear, then another 10 seconds later the rest will appear. I am NOT a fast typist. It also behaves this way for local apps like working on a doc in Word.

I have blown away the OS about 20 times now. I've reinstalled at least 15 times from the DVD backup that I made the day the laptop was delivered. Every time it starts to act quirky before the install even finishes -- it slows down to a crawl after it reaches the screen for McAfee.

I finally gave up and went to the WIN 7 OS disk and the driver disk. I've installed the OS from scratch at least 5 times. I installed them according to the order Dell says to no avail. I've tried installing them in different orders. It makes no difference. I've disabled every thing that isn't necessary for me to run -- the touch screen, the bluetooth, the wireless, the webcam, etc. I've unplugged my external keyboard and mouse. It is AWFUL.

I've hooked up my 7 year old XPS (Pentium M, 2 GHz with 2GB of ram) side by side with my new L702X (Core i7 2.2 GHz, 8GB ram). They both have Win 7 SP1, MS Office 2003 SP3 with Outlook Connector and Firefox. The OLD XPS outperforms the new one in every conceivable way -- even with all peripherals attached and everything turned on.

But it wasn't always this way. When I first got the L702X it was very zippy. After 2 months it started acting up and the fan would go crazy and the cursor would just spin for hours. I started getting "OS missing" messages at bootup, and it wouldn't shut down. The fan would go nuts, the cursor would spin and it would require a hard shutdown after waiting for 30 minutes or so. But trying to restore it back to its factory install doesn't work either. Even when clicking on a tab in a property page it takes forever for the tab to refresh with the correct tab info. Right clicking on a program on the start menu takes forever for the menu to come up.

Typing this has been a nightmare because of the delays. I have to wait for it to catch up to fix typos. Some waits have been a full minute.

So, you have a similar machine except with the 15 inch monitor. I have at least 80+ hours into trying to fix this thing. I still don't know if it's hardware or software. What I do know is that it worked correctly when I got it, then went bonkers 2 months later. It has never been the same and even my DVD's of the factory install don't fix the problem. In fact, it is worse with them than a fresh Win7 install.

Of note, on the drivers disk, the driver install program does not recognize that the laptop has Intel HD graphics  or Intel Centrino Wireless. A novice would be lost with the kludgey driver disk/program. I'm at my wits end.

It reminds me of a hardware error in the background -- one where a device, like a network adapter, keeps encountering errors and keeps retrying and essentially ties up all of the resources. But Task Manager doesn't reveal that to be the case -- there are PLENTY of available resources (CPU and ram). So, I'm thinking it may be a driver or software that was updated from the factory install. But my last fresh install, using all of the original drivers and programs, made no difference at all.

At least I'm not the only one with the weird problem.

Cheryl

Just out of curiosity, do you use wireless or wired  to connect to the internet?

I usually use the wired connection (the L702X has a Realtek 1GB Lan Adapter). It occurs to me that the big difference between my new XPS and older XPS is the LAN adapter. I tried ratcheting down the speed on the Realtek adapter from AUTO-negotiate to 100MB Full Duplex and it seemed to work better. Then I dropped it to 10MB Full Duplex and it seemed to work even better.

So then I turned on my wireless router and disabled the Realtek LAN adapter. At least for now I can open a local app like MS Word and it seems to keep up with my typing. I'm going to use the laptop on wireless today and keep the Realtek adapter disabled.

I believe these laptops ship from the factory with the Realtek defaulted to auto-negotiate, and my laptop worked fine the first two months. Then it went wonky. I suspect that if it turns out that this LAN adapter is the problem, the next question is whether it is a hardware issue or a driver issue, or if Microsoft downloaded some patch that screws up the driver.

I'll report back later on how my L702X performs today.

Hello Fspfernandes,

Do you have your BIOS set to boot from the CD/DVD? If so, change the boot priority to boot first from the hard drive.

This machine has one of the buggiest BIOS's I've ever seen and I've encountered a humongous number of errors/bugs related to the BIOS/Bootstrap.

I kept trying to figure out why it worked so well when I got it from the factory and then went wonky a few months later. What happened was that I started having some kind of CPU related problem,  and to run diags I had to change the BIOS to have the CD/DVD drive as the first boot priority. The problems got exponentially worse after that.

Dell, I hope you are listening. You need to fix this BIOS. It is a mess -- even has spelling errors such as "WARRING" instead of "WARNING". Changing to boot first from the CD/DVD causes a multitude of problems.

1. The message to "Press a key to boot from CD/DVD" rarely appears.

2. Most of the time the BIOS just ignores a bootable disk and continues to boot from the hard drive.

3. Sometimes it tries to boot from the CD/DVD without asking if you want to boot from the CD/DVD.

4. Much of the time, even if it tries to boot from the CD/DVD it either hangs or does rather bizarre things.

5. I had a horrible time installing Windows for the above reasons. Either it wouldn't boot from it, or it would hang, or it would corrupt when loading. This is a REAL problem if you need to reload Windows.

6. The only semi-reliable way to get the PC to boot from the CD/DVD is to do a "warm" reboot -- either "Restart" from the Windows Start Menu or a CTL/ALT/DEL. If Windows won't load, you can't do a warm reboot.

7. If the PC does try to boot from the CD/DVD and it fails, the next time you start the PC it will fail to load Windows and will ask if you want to run "Startup Repair". If you launch Startup Repair it will run FOREVERr and you will have to do exactly what it tells you NOT to do -- you will have to either power off the PC or do a hard shutdown.

Dell, I have somewhere in the vicinity of 100-120 hours into reloading and troubleshooting this machine. You OWE me. Please fix it.

Cheryl

Hi, Cheryl! Thanks for the tip on changing the boot priority. My laptop was set to boot first from the Removable Driver. Probably I myself changed it in one of many attempts to format the machine. This little shift improved a lot the overall system speed. The right click speed now is faster than ever and opening apps are no longer a torture.

Concerning your impressions regarding the boot from the CD/DVD, I myself experienced that on my last attempt to clean install Win7. My own DVD didn't workout as the system simply refused to boot from it. Pretty weird, I think!

Anyway, thank you very much for your time!

You are very welcome! I had so many boot problems with my back up DVD's that it amazing. Same thing with the Windows disc. Mostly they just don't want to boot from the Cd/DVD drive. It suddenly occurred to me that I changed the boot priority when I ran into problems with the PC and wanted to run diags. From there the problem got exponentially worse and has been going downhill for months. I'm not too happy about it as my laptop was actually sent back to Dell for repair and it came back only partially fixed.

They still haven't responded to my email request for tech support.  I sent a copy of this thread after I posted the possible solution. Bear in mind that isn't a fix -- it is just a workaround. Our PC's are still essentially broken. They need to fix this so that the CD/DVD can be the first boot priority. I'm kind of stunned that these laptops were released with these bugs. I used to work in tech support at Intel and problems like this are to be avoided at all costs. After the new wears off the PC and people need to run a bootable app, they are going to encounter these problems and it will cost them a lot in tech support. A lot of folks don't even know how to get into the BIOS, let alone how to handle the problems we encountered. I believe the BIOS needs fixing, which means a BIOS reflash, and most people are not able to do that without tech support talking them through it. There may be problems with the drive itself and potentially the low level drivers. I know it sure screwed up my PC and made it seem like I was using an ancient floppy-based PC.

This isn't a minor issue. The CD/DVD stuff is very buggy and essentially renders the PC un-useable. I think you should submit an actual tech support request to get your PC fixed.

Yes, I totally agree with that.

Have you noticed there's a new BIOS version for the L502X at the donwloads web page? I thought this A10 version would be the end of our problems, but at least here things are the same. The HDD still shows absurd levels of activity despite I'm able to create folders and access the context menu quite quickly. But guess what! Have you tried to play Starcraft 2 on this machine? The game became unplayable here. The graphics freeze and the sounds go like if we were trying to play a scratched music CD. I also noticed I get extremely low levels of frame rates. I have noticed that the game always freezes like that when the HDD Led becomes intermitent. Of course I selected the game to be played from the nvidia GT 540m GPU, but it was useless...

I'm going to send a pic of my dead pixel to the tech support. If I'm lucky, they are going to send in the support personel and I hope he can evaluate the whole situation. Cheers!

Sorry for the delay in responding. This has been a nightmare.

I think we both have a virus -- one that deactivates or interferes with your anti-virus software and it also screws up the BIOS.

What anti-virus do you use? It got past PC Tools AV/AS as well as Dell's much touted McAfee. Dell pretty much washed their hands of it because I wasn't running McAfee -- but McAfee doesn't catch this virus either.

I've blown away the OS on my system about 40 times and the only way to get rid of the virus with a fresh install is to reformat the hard drive, but the virus interferes with the install such that you don't get the option to re-format. That really threw me for a loop.

I suspect the virus is the Anti-Spyware 2012 virus. Do a search on Dell's Support site and try the instructions for removing it.

Alternately you can contact your anti-virus software supplier for assistance.

I had my system blown away and finally got it reformatted and everything was good. Then I went to the PCTools website to download my anti-virus software and immediately got reinfected by logging into the site. I started another OS install before I saw the instructions for the Anti-Spyware 2012.

Since our BIOSes keep getting screwed up you have to get around that problem to actually reboot from your CD/DVD. That is part of the virus -- it prevents you from reformatting the drive. If you decide to reinstall the OS you need to take special steps to get past this problem. Here's how to do it. Get into SETUP and go to EXIT. From the EXIT menu you want to select "Restore Factory Defaults". Restore them and EXIT and SAVE the defaults. DO NOT let the PC boot to Windows or it will mess up your BIOS again. After it saves the default BIOS settings and reboots, interrupt the boot with the F12 key to get the boot options. Select the option to "Boot from CD/DVD Drive", insert your OS disc. If the message telling you to "press a Key to Boot from CD/DVD" doesn't appear quickly, then press the SpaceBar anyway. Hopefully it will boot properly from the CD/DVD. If it doesn't then try again. Just remember that if it boot to Windows on your hard drive then it will screw up the BIOS again.

Let me know how you do with this.

Aloha,

Cheryl

Go to this link. support.dell.com/.../document

It is actually called the Antispyware 2012 virus.

I have Kaspersky Internet Security and Tune-Up Utilities 2012 softwares and the idea of a virus looks a bit strange to me, but I'm going to give your hint a shot this weekend. But first, let me know this: did your hdd led has slown down and the overall speed became respectable for a i5 processor and  a 8GB Ram combo?

Cheers!

Hi,

Sorry for the delay -- I've had a battle royal with Dell over this whole thing. To make a long, horrible story short I ran 4 different AV scanners on my multiple PC's, all external hard drives, and all flash drives. Nada. No viruses of any kind. I've fought with them over this slow-down issue for 2 months.

My system is an L702X so it is a little different. My HDD Led is on the back where you can't see it unless you turn the PC around -- not real convenient. But I always had the sense that something was reading and re-reading my hard drive so much that it was killing the performance.

While fighting with Dell, the problems got worse. I started getting more and more "Operation system not found" and "Bootmgr is missing". Then I started seeing 2 programs load at boot up which a user should never see on a modern computer. They are MSCDEX and PXE. The first one is what allows you to boot from your CD/DVD, and the other one allows you to boot from LAN or a flash drive. On top of it, these 2 programs would hang while trying to load. When they started appearing I knew the system was having serious problems reading the BOOT RECORD on the hard drive. Then it got so bad that the PC would not boot at all and the only thing that would happen is the message "Bootmgr not found, press CRL-ALT-DEL to reboot." Of course, it would never reboot.

I used Microsofts BOOTREC program to patch the Boot Record enough that it would boot on a cold boot, but it would not boot if you did a RESTART. At that point I was positive that it was the BOOT PARTITION on the hard drive. I tried every option that the BOOTREC program has to fix it to no avail. The only option at that point was a low-level formal of the hard drive. So, at that point I called Dell yet again. They made me run diags on the hard drive overnight but diags couldn't find a problem. Many of the techs aren't very good. The diags will NOT detect a problem if the problem is a BOOT RECORD that is full of garbage. So, just to make myself happy I bought another hard drive from Amazon and installed it. It worked just fine. At that point I was able to convince Dell that they needed to do the right thing and replace the darn drive.

They came out and installed a new factory hard drive yesterday. Other than a few problems with the drivers in the image, my laptop is now up and working like it did when new. I'm using the drive I bought as a second drive for backups.

If you are technical enough you can try using BOOTREC to fix your boot record. There is a document, article #927392 on Microsoft support that partially explains how to do it. If you aren't comfortable with old DOS type commands then you might not want to try it. At any rate, I believe it is your hard drive that has a corrupted boot record since your symptoms were so similar to mine. It is the corrupted boot record that makes the BIOS act so strange. When it boots up it reads that record before it gives you the option to boot from CD/DVD, and if the boot record is screwed up then it screws up the whole BIOS.

If Dell isn't responsive to replacing your hard drive then let me know and I'll give you my last case number that they can refer to. The new hard drive fixed all my problems.

Aloha,

Cheryl

i m suffering from same problems and i dont have a warranty so replacement of hard disk is not an option .. is there any other solution ?

I had exactly the same issue with my L502x. The issue is with Windows 7 system restore feature that causes excessive disk thrashing on C:\System Volume Information. I did the following things

1. Turn off System restore,

2. Deleted all previous restore points

3. Defragment all disks

Now my system is zippy once again,as it was when i had purchased it.

Note: You may want to turn on system restore again at the end of these steps, if you plan to use the feature