Two weeks ago I was contacted by a Dell engineer who wanted to replace the motherboard on my XPS17 and we arranged a time and place. I thought it was to do with the battery drain issue that the first XPS17's suffered from but he seemed to have no knowledge of that problem. I had reported an issue two months ago where lightly tapping on the wrist support to the left of the trackpad shut the laptop down but that seemed to sort itself out and everything was running normally.

Motherboard replaced and no sign of life from the laptop. He returned two days later and replaced the motherboard again and left it all running.

I switched off the laptop, went out for a couple of hours and when I returned there was no sign of life in the laptop. It took another five days to get the laptop running again (nearly properly).

I have no problems when running from the charger. My problem comes when trying to boot up using battery power. If the battery charge is more than (about) 50% the laptop boots up. If it is below 50% then the Dell logo comes up on screen, the rotating circle of dots comes on for a few seconds, the cooling fans come on very strong and everything shuts down.

If I now plug in the charger the laptop boots up fine. If I try booting without the charger a second time nothing happens but now when I plug int he charger the support assist (in BIOS?) starts up, and eventually I am given a previously saved point which entails having to reinstall drivers.

I've been on to the Dell Technical Support EMEA and we seem to go round and round in circles. I've checked the bios, I've run support assist, I've checked the charger, etc. At one point the CPU temperature was showing 89C and both fans were running at 3280rpm which seemed to be a novelty to the support team, they wanted a photo of it!

Any ideas of what to try next?

Many thanks

Mark