Help! My new Dell Studio XPS 13 Laptop keeps on freezing up!

AHAHA!

I have well and truly had it with this thing!

5 hardware service calls in less than 3 months!

Closed the lid on the machine last night, unpluged it from power this morning, started hibernating. ok fine, my fault.. 20 minutes later.. still thrashing the HDD and no output via the LCD.

So a force power off..

Upon powering on POST takes longer than usual.. CMOS checksum error

Great. so I pop into the bios and reconfigure everything and reboot..

Same thing.. "Okay maybe the battery is loose" i say to myself after entering date/time etc again.

This time, no cmos error. yay!

Boot into windows BSOD.

did safe mode all the usual tricks.

after 6 hours of troubleshooting i know for a fact its the MB/BIOS.

-Cant flash the bios from vista safe mode or a mini-xp disc.. apparently the battery is missing.. the CPU cant be detirmend and neither can the old BIOS.

-if a USB hdd is connected I cant boot any flavour of linux when i could previously

-If i remove a usb device (a mouse for example) BSOD..even in safe mode!

Dell diag throws errors about USB devices (cant ping them!)

I cant even back this thing up as I cant boot into Acronis with a USB hdd attached. I've spoken to DELL and demanded a new motherboard gets delivered today (politley)  and I now have a case with customer care regarding compensation has I have spent well over 20Hours diagnosing hardware faults with this machine and its not like is used for gaming or browsing.. this is my work machine and Im a sys-admin at an ISP. I cant justify buying Dell servers when the CIO sees me with a dell tech and my laptop in bits constantly!

Give me my I-9400 back!

After my CMOS checksum occurred, I had to reset the SATA controller to AHCI or my Vista installation would BSOD too.

Well, my laptop arrived from the depot today after 14 days. They claim I have a bad hard drive, even though the system locked up while running the Dell memory diagnostic from firmware ...

To top it all off, the note states they didn't have my hard drive model in the warehouse, so I have to wait 3 days for them to ship me a replacement from another location. Great. Just great. I'm going to run diagnostics on it with no hard drive even installed and when it locks up, call support and my sales rep back.

sorry to hear that man.

you should just ask them for a proper replacement, probably to a different model.

Okay, bear in mind that there are 2 "Diagnostic" tools, one runs from the BIOS doing all the RAM checks, (blue screen white writing) the one with the GUI is actually located on a 100MB partition on the HDD hidden from windows. You can throw it into your GRUB menu.list and boot it from there if you hose the MBR (Like I do)

But Yes, I've had mine lock up in Dell Diag too (GUI) very frustrating! (more indications that the hardware is playing funny business)

Anyway, I had a tech come out to fix my last issue.
Dell offered a 4hr turn around to get my lappy fixed and I respect that, good job the XPS support team.

Tech arrived with MB/CPU/CMOS Battery/Main battery.And no thermal grease/pad. 

After replacing the whole kit, the machine would happily boot of USB so I could backup my data (finally) and rectify the BSOD issue

So now my machine is running hotter than it used to (as this is the thrid time the pad has been "recycled")

The Media keys are playing up again, turning Wifi/BT on and off at random  or just completely locking up and going bright on a few keys in both windows and linux only a hard reboot fixes this, the HDD led no longer functions and the media keys sometimes light up if the laptop is OFF and a USB device is inserted into the e-sata/USB port

I've spent countless hours troubleshooting this machine, not to mention re-installing windows 3 times (being a sysadmin I have a lot of stuff to install and no. I didnt untill recently have a ghost image) So I have asked Dell to ship me a brand new XPS 1340 of the same spec.. even though the only things that havent been changed are the LCD/Keyboard/Case  I am sick of having my laptop torn to shreds by some dude that doesnt care how well he puts it back together (let me change the parts maybe.. then I can do it at my leisure not when your tech is free?)

I've spoken to 2 of the XPS support team that assured me two days ago that a manager would call me yesterday... No go.

My Dell rep has at least gotten back to me, but she is unable to help on the technical level and TBH she shouldnt have to be involved in customer care solutions.

anyone else completely and utterly fed up with theirs... I'm thinking a change to a MacbookPro might be in order (and I've been windows/dos since 286's!) one of my co-workers just got the E4200.. we are counting the days till something goes wrong..

Did anyone find the cause or a solution to the problem?

The new A11 BIOS fixes the problem.I installed it more than a week ago and from then, i have no problems.

Cheers

NoeL

I am also using the new BIOS. It didn't help me. 

My laptop came back from the depot and they stated it was a hard drive problem. They didn't have any in stock, so I had to wait for a hard drive to arrive separately. I ran my machine using Linux off a USB drive for 2 days while waiting for the hard drive to arrive and I didn't have any issues. I'm not sure what they did because I tried running Linux off a USB flash drive before sending it in with the same lockups, but so far things seem fine. I haven't run it for very long with Hybrid SLI enabled however. They shipped me back the "defective" hard drive (it was a WD Black 320GB drive) and replaced it with a refurbished Seagate I believe. The "defective" hard drive is working perfectly in another machine, so unless it was some weird issue between WD and the controller, I think they must have actually performed some other fix.

I did upgrade to A11 last night and same the same behavior I saw before, where the machine wasn't locked up, but no video updates would display. I had to pull the power out to disable Hybrid SLI, put the laptop to sleep by closing the lid, wake it up, uninstall the Dell nVidia drivers, and then reinstall them to get the system stable again. It's been running fine since.

I had my motherboard replaced by dell, bios updated to A11 and Vista 64bit rolled back to it's factory state. 

I still have the freezing problem, but I noticed something very interesting: The freezing occur much more often when the computer is not plugged to the AC charger. 

The laptop is brand new the and problem happens from day 1, and it looks like dell are clueless.

Does anyone know the cause for the problem or have a solution for it? 

Thank you!

Hello,

Back in July, I installed BIOS A07 as well as the new NVIDIA driver updates both from Dell's site.  Since then my computer has never crashed/frozen.  I run 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium Edition.  I was having the freezing happening at least once a day, with the exception of when I used a cooling pad -- that reduced it to freezing every other day or so.  I still have problems with the hotkeys not always working and although I'm typing this from a 2003 linux box, I guess that I'm fairly satisfied with my XPS1340, but the lack of help from Dell and the fact that it took so long to fix the issue makes me refuse to purchase another in the future.  Let me know if any of you think that my computer's specs might help you.

Cheers!

HI.

I got my xps 13 delivered to me yesterday morning. And from then till now I had more or less 5-6 freezes, the most recent one being half an hour ago. The freezing is very random. I tried updating to most of the drivers available except for the Nvidia driver which encountered a problem because the driver only supports 32bit windows. perhaps this could be the problem? i tried installing the driver directly from Nvidia's website but it stated 'The manufacturer of this system requires that you download the driver for your GPU from their support site.'

I'm running bios A11, vista 64 bit.

Anyone can offer any help before i call Dell come Monday?

The general consensus is to:

- update to bios A1

- update dell Nvidia drivers

- Control Panel > Power Options > Change to a windows power plan from the dell default (disable hybrid sli in the advance options)

Has anyone noticed that if your screen blanks with the lid open, you have to close the lid (put the laptop fully to sleep) and wake it back up to get video output again? This only started after BIOS A11. The keyboard keys are backlit, I can see the hard drive light flickering occasionally, and if I press left-shift enough times, I can hear the sticky-keys audible alert, but the screen refuses to come back on.