DELL 390 HARDWARE ISSUES

Which 390, Precision or Optiplex? Have you contacted your Dell Technical Account Manager? 

They are Dell Optiplex 390s. And, Yes, we have contacted her. We've submitted a detailed report of all the issues we've had. She has taken back this information but hasn't provided any resolution at this time. I've received the notes you've provided and we will try the steps on our next work order we receive. By the way, Thank you. I'll keep you posted.

I did see these but I do not know if they apply to your issues -

No POST after power applied -
Some systems may exhibit a no POST symptom, especially after being normally shutdown and allowed to idle in the hibernate or off power states. The symptom is a brief power up with a momentary blue power LED and a solid amber diag LED 3 followed by an immediate shut down. Engineering is aware of this issue and investigating a long term fix. A workaround is to restart the system and enter the Bios. Disable the Bios setting for Power Management -Deep Sleep Control. Save the change and exit the Bios.

No POST after being powered on for some time -
The symptom is that the system will immediately shut down when the power button is pressed. The diagnostic LED 3 may stay illuminated momentarily during the failure. There is a solid workaround which is to change the BIOS setting for Deep Sleep to disable. Obviously to do this you must get the system to boot. So, in order to boot the system, remove the AC power and press the test button on the power supply for several seconds. Re-attach the AC power and attempt to power on.  If this doesn’t work, you can remove the system lid, then remove the USBF1 connector from the motherboard (green connector near the PSU side of the motherboard). The system should POST with USBF1 removed. When the system does POST, hit F2 to enter the system setup menu, then find the deep sleep setting and set it to disable. Re-plug the USBF1 connector, and the issue should be cleared.

Similarly we've had 16 DELL Optiplex 390's and have had to replace 6 or 7 of the motherboards for the same reasons.. I'll check those settings if it happens again.

More annoyingly we're experiencing problems with the on-board Realtek NICs on every single unit  No actual packet loss but lots of latency, it's resulting in consistently poor network access. If I ping any device on the network it will probably start at 1ms< and after a few seconds start jumping between 100-500ms.. it never improves or remains stable.

I wiped the drive and re-installed Windows 7 x64 SP1 from the DELL Media and then only installed the Realtek GBE Driver and the problem remained. I've tried the driver from DELL Support site, the driver from Windows Update and the latest driver direct from Realtek, same problem with all. I've changed every single one of the advanced settings on the NIC and it didn't make a difference. Same problem exists with Windows 7 x86 SP1. If I install an Intel NIC everything works perfectly.

If I plug a DELL Vostro 220 (which has the same onboard Realtek GBE Controller) into the same network socket with the same cable, the ping results are always a stable 1ms< so the problem must be unique to the Optiplex 390's.

Are DELL aware of any problems with the onboard NIC? We've dealt with DELL for over 10 years and never experienced anything like this, has totally shaken not only my faith but our clients as well.

Well you'll be pleased to know that BIOS A05 removed the option for Deep Sleep which should in turn resolve any problems with workstations not powering up properly (unless of course the PSU really has blown)

If you're experiencing network latency, make sure you have the latest driver direct from Realtek and DISABLE Interrupt Moderation in the Advanced tab of the NIC settings. You can also try changing disabling SERR messages in the Bios->Maintenance screen.

The combination above seems to have fixed all our networking issues, the difference is night and day even just opening Word files and browsing network shares. If you're not sure whether you're affected or not, just ping an IP address continuously, you might find that the first 10 pings are okay but more often than not you'll immediately see that the response times are all over the place (anywhere from 1ms->500ms).

TrulyVexed.  I saw your response on Experts-Exchange and wanted to say a hearty THANK YOU for posting this!  I have two Optiplex 390's on our small office network and they've been causing me trouble for over a year because of this "Interrupt Moderation" setting.  I turned it off and the Ping latency has gone away.  However, I'm noticing that a mapped drive that points to our server share still routinely disconnects.  The administrator share is still available though.

For example:

\\server1\public (is mapped to "P" drive and is unavailable from time-to-time)

\\server1\e$\public (is where the public folder share exists and I can browse it at the same time the "P" drive is unavailable)

It's nice to see that my pings are back to <1ms, but unfortunately this problem is still looming.

At any rate, thanks for the latency fix!