M1730 Intermittent Startup Problems

Hi;

Can anyone shed any light on the problem I seem to have?

My XPSM1730 boots and works perfectly some of the time but sometimes when restarting it seems to hang. This hang is very early in the boot process during the initial screen output by the BIOS. The progress bar which normally finishes in a second stops at the point that the F2 and F12 options are displayed and then it takes about 30 seconds to finish.

OK - then the screen is refresshed and up pops the Intel Raid configuration. Now here it sometimes stops for a second and then proceeds into VISTA boot as expected. Sometimes though, it just hangs with a cursor flashing at me for minutes on end. I usually get fed up and try to reboot after a few minutes!

Also noticed once that instead of a cursor a set of charactes were being echoed to the screen just after the RAID configuration. The same set of characters were repeated across the same line after a few seconds, then again and again?! Weird characters - unusual symbols!

Erm - I fear that this might be a problem with heat affecting the hardware.

This laptop is a couple of weeks old and I will be contacting Dell Support but I wonder if anyone else has seen this?

Many thanks (sorry for long post)

Paul W.