Problems with Studio 1737 ejecting CD's

Just an update,

The "Dell" tech came yesterday and replaced the hinge cover (it was bad). Now the soft touch multimedia buttons work as well as the blutooth. The tech said that dell is keeping him very busy and that these Studio 15's and 17's are good machines just need some tweeking. He also mention that most of the issues we're all having; mouse, eject button, etc. are all fixable with downloads/ soft ware. Very few are like mine and have  hardware issues. 

Thanks to all posters,

John

Hi again,

Sorry yeserday was one of those days so I'm just getting back to my PC. The Dell tech did not metion anything about the speakers. But the soft eject button raised it's angry head last night. My wife was working and I noticed the eject light was on, she says the PC makes eject noices every so often but it does not prevent anything from working and when I installed my printer drivers last night the disc stayed in the slot. As for the eject light, when it was on none of the other soft touch buttons work. After a few minutes it went out and the other buttons worked again. I give up, the dell tech said they're working on some known issues and that corrective updates would be coming out soon. I guess we have to wait. Hopefully it will just take a download to correct in a few weeks. LOL

John

Hi, my studio 1737 arrived on Tues and after spending the best part of 2 days transferring all my bumf i noticed that the eject button and F10 eject was not working. Just spent 2 hours on a live chat where the guy accessed my comp..uninstalled/reinstalled an infrared driver and a Quickset uninstall/re-install and then got me to reseat the hinge. Nothing worked.Got an engineer coming out tomorrow to replace motherboard and other stuff. My Bios is A04 and i might show him this thread before he starts!

Not sure if I am happy having my Laptop in bits 2 days after buying it!!!

will update in the morning.

CS

CS, Also check the sound. Try playing various CD's, such as music, video etc. The sound on many of theseStudio 1737's is very low and tinny. 

Quick update, engineer phoned and cancelled on Fri due to lack of Parts ( motherboards I think). Phoned Dell and said I want a replacement not a repair..they are phoning back on Mon. It seems a bit excessive to replace a motherboard when all that is not working is the touch sensative media key!

Will update again on Mon.

CS

Hello to you,

I do have the same problems ejecting my CD's as reported. I bought a Dell Studio 1737, delivered with a BIOS A04. I've tried your suggestion Shiva, however I couldn't find any option called "Maintenance". Entering the BIOS setup utility I was offered a menu (on top of scrn) which showed the options Main Advanced Security Boot and Exit.

In Exit I found an option Load Setup "Defaults, which I activated. After Exit Saving Changes I found that the problem still persists.

Did I miss something? Pls help.

Hi,

Engineer came today...changed touchpad completely...no good......changed the whole motherboard next and the eject button worked!!!

Engineer left and then I noticed the start up screen looked slightly different so I checked the BIOS and found it had been reset to A00 when it came with A04 !!! No mention of this from the engineer!

Went on Dell site and downloaded the only available BIOS update A02 and the eject buttons still work. Everything appears to be working the same so I shall leave it alone!

As a side issue will I now have to reinstall all the driver updates I have already done (graphics cards etc)?

Cheers.

CS

Glad that the CD player now works!  How about the sound quality and volume of the sound? 

Shiva Thanks for your reply. In the meantime I flashed my BIOS with A02. The problem is solved.

However to flash BIOS you need to disable your User Account Control in Vista as standard delivered by Dell.

How to do:

1. Launch MSCONFIG by from the Run menu.

2. Click on the Tools tab. Scroll down till you find "Disable UAC" . Click on that line.

1. Press the Launch button.

2. A CMD window will open. When the command is done, you can close the window.

3. Close MSCONFIG. You need to reboot the computer for changes to apply.

You can re-enable UAC by selecting the "Enable UAC" line and then clicking on the Launch button.

Hope people can take advantage from this information.

Regards,

Eric

I tried downgrading the bios to A02 (dell service told me that this version should solve the problem) but it did not let me to. The tool always tells me to run it as admin or to disable uac. But thats exactly what I did!

Does anyone know a solution for this problem?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

René K.

I have some useful information that might help anyone who has this issue with the eject button not working in vista but ok in bios and boot up mode.

I'm helping a friend who bought 2 studio 1737's 1 for himself another for a friend. Initially there was a problem with dvd/blueray playing back all stuttered in media direct. After many hours on the phone to tech support and various engineer visits I found the solution to the problem, which was a bad update patch that Media direct downloads (the 1st 1 you get after the install from the supplied disc-or from factory) I hope that they have withdrawn in now , but if this patch is missed and the next later update applied (downloaded separately not via MD) all is well.

Back to the main issue here, I'm guessing that most people here with the eject issue just have the studio with the dvd burner without blueray playback. If so is this the HLDS GA10N 12.7mm SATA Slotload 8X DVDRW that is shown in the driver downloads section. This unit is made by LG/Hitachi and thats where the problem lies in its' compatibility with the Dell BIOS.

Because of the previous issue with stuttered DVD/BD playback an engineer had swapped the optical drive before I had found the actual cause. The drive that initially was supplied was an OPTIARC BC-5600S 12.7mm SATA Slotload BD-Combo which is made by Sony. This drive did not suffer from the eject issue. The BIOS on the studio was an A04 and with the OPTIARC the eject is fine, additionally with a BIOS upgrade to A05 the eject is also fine. We can test this as we have 2 machines one with the original drive and the other one with the replacement fitted.

The thing is that they replaced the original with another blueray drive made by LG/Hitachi very similar to the GA10N, and only then did the eject issue occur. the replacement drive is "HL-DT-ST DVDRWBD CA10N". This has the eject issue with either A04 BIOS or A05 BIOS.

I can only conclude that it is therefore related to these makes of drives and how they interact with the Dell BIOS. Either another BIOS update is required or a firmware upgrade on nthe optical drives may solve the problem. In the meantime we are requesting that another Sony Optiarc BD drive be supplied as we know that this is fully compatible with the present setup.

Hello,

I also had an eject problem with a Dell Studio 1737 with Blu-Ray drive received 10 days ago.

But my problem has nothing to do with the ones you are speaking about : it looked like purely mechanical. All eject attempts were working on the software point of view, but they were unsuccessful : the drive made ejecting noise, but the disc stayed stucked inside it (and it was not even possible to read it).

After checking with technical support, they decided to completely replace the CD drive (by a technician coming to my home).

The original (faulty) drive was Optiarc DVDRWBD BC-5600S ATA.

The new drive (after replacement) is HL-DT-ST DVDRWBD CA10N ATA.

BIOS was initially A05. During the tests for identifying the problem, the technician on telephone asked me to flash A02 instead.

After reading the previous posts in this topic, I hope I will not leave a mechanical ejecting problem for getting a software ejecting problem.

Gilles R.

So they replaced the sony optiarc drive originally supplied with the LG/Hitachi one (as they did with my friends machine). And yes the eject will now work with bios A02 (not with A05) but what they won't tell you is that there are issues with that bios. In order for that drive to function properley you'll have to wait for them to bring out the A06 updated bios, whenever that may be. The device may not be recognised by certain software, try the built in Roxio burning software, my bet is that it doesn't recognise the optical drive. If this is the case your choice is either to wait for the bios update or request them to replace the new optical drive with one similar to the original optiarc (made by sony).

The sony works properly with the latest bios. Be careful with the media direct updates, they are still having lots of problems with their software. i've figured how to get it working by missing one of the auto updates (which if installed with render your blue ray playback useless and all staggered.)

But despite informing dell in detaill they still seem to be offering this problem update, indeed to make matters worse they have included it in the updates for the inspiron series which was  working properly but now is useless. Thus media direct must be completely uninstalled and reinstalled then updated but avoiding the problem patch.

All I can deduce from this is that they do not test these updates before there are publicly released, all it would take is to test playing a blueray disc to know it would not work.

Also don't be fobbed off by the 1st line tech response of restoring your system to factory, often this is totally unnecessary. I dealt with the mess that was left on a colleagues laptop after the tech took control of the laptop in a vain attempt to repair the issue (unsucessfully) after 3 hours. I found the issue and fixed it in under 40mins. Fortunately we had made a ghost image before, so we didn't have to go through the whole pc setup again.

Hello,

I certainly wouln't have accepted to restore my system to factory, especially after having spent two or three full days on creating a dual boot with Window XP Pro and installing the huge amount of software and development tools (Microsoft Visual Studio, etc...) that I need for working, on both systems.

The flashed replacement of the BIOS, also, raised another problem which missed needing replacing the whole motherboard during the same operation : an unexpected password appeared preventing me from entering the BIOS setup. Fortunately, I found later that the password was I password that I set up myself in the past, and then immediately canceled. The BIOS flash made it coming back, but I haven't memorized nor written it as I expected it to no longer exist. After some password tries, I found the solution, and I canceled the motherboard part of the operation.

Another thing : I was very disappointed by the fact that the Dell technician coming for replacing my BD drive had a very bad knowledge of my Dell Studio 1737 computer : I expected that either he would have a good experience on this precise computer, or that he would have brought with him a complete printed technical documentation for doing the disassembly. During his maintenance work, I was so scared that he could do something wrong that I searched for the technical Dell Studio 1737 documentation on Internet (fortunately I was able to use another computer for that) and I asked him to read it (which he agreed it was useful).

Do you know if there are other softwares (not provided by Dell) which could be used for playing Blu-Ray discs instead of Media Direct ? Whatever it can read correctly Blu-Ray discs with this drive or not, I never have liked being stucked on the usage of a unique software for reading any kind of media, especially if this software is tied to a unique brand or type of computer.

Gilles R.