Replacement 8500s freezing?

I am by no means saying that Dell support is GOOD.  You have to talk to the right people is all, and be persistent in order to get what you want.  Which is extremely difficult.  There is also a communication barrier there, due to people not fully understanding what you are saying and vice versa.  I am saying parts of Dell support is good, such as their shipping department.

Sofistek,

When I read your post these thoughts came to mind:

When any tech support suggests that I reformat or reinstall the OS and I feel it is unjustified I usually refuse. Like when I was failing BOOT Diagnostics (F12) during post. I asked them why should I reinstall the OS when the OS isn't even loaded yet? So I refused to comply with the OS reinstall. So, the tech support person had to figure out what else to do besides "Software" reinstalls. It was a hardware problem in the end and its taken care of now, but what about the innocent users out there who don't know enough to tell the support person "No!, lets try something else first"... Makes you wonder...

It turns out the way to get up the Support ladder is to call 2 days in a row and you will be sent up a level.    As to my system, no trouble yet after two days of being on most of the time.      

After a few exchanges with support, they've asked me to reformat my hard disk and reinstall Windows XP. I asked what their rational for that was. I also mentioned that I'd run a complete diagnostics check that showed no hard disk problems, but I'd only mentioned this in response to their suggestion to reformat. Yet their rational was that my diagnostics had shown that there wasn't a hardware problem and so it must be the operating system.

Is this good support? They gave no reason for their suggestion and then used the further information that I gave them to belatedly justify it. I have mentioned that many others have experienced the same problem but they have not referred to that at all.

method404 suggested that Dell support is good, even if the machine is bad. I haven't had time to phone yet, but my e-mail support experience is poor. Someone from Dell did phone me at home, when I was at work and left a message that they would phone again later. That was over a week ago.

Tony

Thanks, fabcomjj.

I feel like saying that I've reformatted and re-installed but it's had no effect. However, what if a reinstall can help me? The support guy is saying that since the diagnostics check out (though he didn't know that at that time), it must be a software problem. Now I'm 99.99999999% certain it is a hardware problem but only manifests itself on a random basis. So, of course the diagnostics worked while it wasn't frozen. However, maybe there's a slight chance that, for me, a reinstall would work or at least mask the problem for ever.

I think I'm going to have to try it but it's a pain.

Tony

I'm back to thinking this is something to do with the motherboard/BIOS/usb.  Last night, I took my notebook over to a friends to do some extensive work in 3D applications and photoshop.  While having a USB mouse plugged in, everything was perfect.  We took a couple of breaks and played Call of Duty as well.  We worked for close to 8 hours and I had no problems at all and I recall after I installed Windows2000, I had gone on vacation for close to 3 weeks and took a usb mouse with me, during that time I had very few freezes and I can't recall if when I did have the freezes, the mouse was plugged in or not.  Nevertheless the freezes were MUCH MUCH less and possibly completely gone with a usb mouse attached.  Now, when I do work in Photoshop I use a drawing tablet.  A Wacom Intuos.  When I had the USB mouse AND the USB tablet attached at the same time, I could not boot up.  The notebook would FREEZE during BIOS bootup, on the Dell screen to be specific.  EVERYTIME.  It never failed.  However, as soon as I only had one device attached there was no hitch during bootup.  This is what got the wheels turning a bit in my head.  I would like to test some other usb devices and see if this occurs all the time when 2 devices are attached, or just an isolated occurance with the Wacom tablet.  In eithercase, could these freezes be related to the USB port/bios ?

I boot fairly regularly with a USB mouse and USB memory stick.  That configuration doesn't cause me any bootup problems, so the "2 USB devices cause freeze" isn't necessarily accurate; at least not in my case.

I have, however noticed that if I either am running off the battery and I use the touchpad, I see a higher failure rate.  Again, may just be my imagination, but that's what I'm seeing

Well, I did what Dell support suggested and reinstalled XP Pro, with a disk reformat. It was a pain since I think I'm now missing some software that I'm sure was on the preloaded machine. Not that I used them much, if at all, but there were some fully licensed lightweight graphics programs plus some evaluation software. I can't find them on any CD.

No matter.

The other problem was that I couldn't create a boot CD to format the hard disk (support, support articles, and some downloads, don't seem to realise that the I8500, by default, doesn't have a floppy).

Anyway, I formatted from the XP install instead (which I would have had to do anyway, to get NTFS), and reinstalled the OS, the OS updates, video, audio, modem and network drivers, plus most of the applications. What a pain.

It was all working fine then I went to get something to eat. Came back about an hour later to a frozen machine.

Oh, well, I had to try. At least I seemed to have gained about 9GB of free disk space!

What is that 43MB partition at the front of the hard disk for?

Tony

sofistek:

Of course hindsite is 20 -  20, however, if you feel it would help and are absolutely postive about it then by all means reformat and re-install OS. Its just that I got the feeling you didn't think it would help.

The thing that annoys me about a reinstall is the software isn't the same as it was when it came from Dell. None of the 3rd party programs seem to work correctly. On the other hand there have been many occasions on some machines that it was absolutely necessary to have reformatted and reinstalled the OS.

So there you have it, caught between a rock and a hard place. What to do, should I or shouldn't I. It's a tough decision to make even when your very experienced.

Also I had another brain fart... If XP is more CPU intensive than 2K then maybe it is a memory problem more than it is an OS problem. I mean that Win2K just does what your saying "mask the problem" temporarily.

And no doubt it is a pain to do, and time consuming.

Good Luck

So several days have passed since the tech guy replaced virtually the entire machine and I have not had a single machine.

I don't know the cause but the scatter gun approach hit it somewhere.

 

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@fabcomjj wrote:

sofistek:

Of course hindsite is 20 - 20, however, if you feel it would help and are absolutely postive about it then by all means reformat and re-install OS. Its just that I got the feeling you didn't think it would help.

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I have already tried it, as I mentioned in my last post. I didn't think it would help either but I felt that I had to give it a go before getting back to Dell support. I'm just happy that I got the freeze soon after doing the reformat and re-install, instead of having to wait 7-10 days, which is my usual gap between freezes.

Tony

WOW!! Check this out ...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,103955,00.html

Interesting story about our friends at DELL.  Maybe there is hope yet!
Before I commented on how DELL was conducting surveys now at the end of my calls and wondered if others were asked to do so, or if I was isolated due to the amount of calls.  However, it looks like the surveys paid off.  Maybe DELL *IS* listening after all.... 

 

Message Edited by method404 on 11-25-2003 04:23 PM

A glimmer of hope but it doesn't help Inspiron customers, according to the report.

As for my freeze problems, tech support are now trying to palm me off onto software support. There is no way this is a software problem, certainly not a Windows XP problem. If it is, then that little logo at the bottom right ("Designed for Windows XP") means that Dell got their design wrong.

Still no acknowledgement that many others are having the problem.

Tony

Tech support are still trying to palm me off to software support. I phoned the number to find that I have to pay £20 to get them to resolve the problem. Will they have to resolve it if I go ahead? Should be interesting.

This is how tech support decided it was a software issue (still no acknowledgement of others having the problem): They asked me to run the system file checker (sfc). I can't imagine how this would find errors, since I'd just reinstalled the OS. It didn't find errors but took ages. Then they asked me to disable every device that windows would let me disable. I then rebooted and the system came up, but with almost no devices. Of course, it was completely unusable in this state but I left it for a couple of hours and ran the odd program, although there was nothing useful I could do (no CD drive, no network, no printer, no modem, so no way to get data in or out), particularly as I still haven't re-installed all of the software I normally use.

I reported that it didn't freeze in two hours. So tech support said the base system seems to work fine, it must be some software I'm running. Incidentally, the system froze as I was trying to reboot after re-enabling everything. I wasn't running any other software. (I'd also told them, several times, that there can be up to 10 days between freezes.)

An odd thing happened though, but I haven't been able to reproduce it. After re-enabling devices, my lid switch wouldn't work, so closing the lid didn't have any effect on the system. I checked the device manager and noticed that I hadn't enabled the secondary IDE channel (sure enough, I had no DVD drive). After re-enabling that and eventually rebooting, the lid switch worked fine. Doesn't that indicate some problem with the motherboard?

Tony