9100 will not POST/boot.

Question

The verbose one is back with another heart-stopper of a problem with my Inspiron 9100. When we last saw our hero, his Radeon Mobility 9700 had failed on Christmas Day but would boot into safe mode or basevideo mode. He used Winternals to gain access to another PC via a LAN connection and back up his data. Dell support dispatched a new Radeon, tech replaced, and all was well for 2 weeks. In our latest episode, I am on a business trip and quite reliant on my Inspiron 9100 for obvious reasons. Attempted to boot the machine last night and got....2 beeps. No BIOS screen, no disk activity, no response to keystrokes (such as F2 to enter SETUP). Being an IT consultant by trade, I removed all that could be removed in an attempt to isolate the problem. No luck. Called tech support. For detailed phone support info read on, or skip to RESOLUTION STEPS. A phone call to the main Dell support number was made at 9:20 pm. Call was answered at 10:40 pm. That's 1 hr 20 min if you're scoring at home. 1:20 is bad enough, but I had to listen to the canned announcement about using the Dell web site and resolving the problem myself ad infinitum. Dell should modify their system to either a) give the caller the option to hear silence or music instead of this claptrap or b) eliminate the claptrap after 5-10 minutes. I know my call is important - it's why I made it in the first place. I know you're working hard and call volume is heavy but 1 hour+ is excessive by any reasonable standard. I know you appreciate my patience, but what choice do I have? I am not naive; I know tech support is a big cost center (often the biggest) for computer and IT. Companies like Dell have every rea$on to try to avoid providing tech support quickly and easily and every reason to dissuade end-users from calling. I suppose I would do the same, especially if I held a boatload of shares of Dell stock and wanted their value to increase. However, if you're in the tech industry, support is a necessary evil. Judging from the activity on this board, it seems to be a little more necessary than ever. I think I got a guy in Mexico (?) as opposed to India/Asia. His accent was a bit thick, but fortunately he understood my heavy Appalachian accent and, most importantly, could understand the idioms we use in everyday speech (for example 'no luck' instead of 'that didn't work'). With all due respect to our knowledgeable Indian friends, the language barrier is an insurmountable obstacle when the phone is your only means of communication. There have been a few newspaper articles about Indian call centers 'training' the accent out of their employees. If there are such call centers, they ain't working with Dell! That's why people resent outsourcing. RESOLUTION STEPS Phone tech had me repeat all that had gone before. Hard to believe but I think the situation deteriorated as the fans and LCD wouldn't even kick on. Now pressing the on/off button got me a flashing CAPS LOCK indicator. It would blink steadily 9 times, then the power indicator would wink off. This behavior is repeatable, but not much help. My conclusion originally was that the motherboard was shot - perhaps the VGA problems last month were a sign of things to come. The phone tech agreed - what else could he do? Diagnostics weren't even possible. I have read other threads, specifically the experience of user mikewi who had his MB replaced and fixed his problem(s). So, a motherboard is on the way and another major surgery is scheduled. I have a Latitude CPxH that has been through the wars and never given me an ounce of trouble. This expensive 9100 has had a shockingly bad service record since its ship date of 4/13/04. Message Edited by relictele on 01-12-2005 03:12 PM

arcath · Answer

OMG lol....sounds so familiar.

Ever since blizzard released their xmas patch. My system has been really screwy. Blizzard is famous for getting everything out of their code, well that's true it seems for the new patch to World of Warcraft. It melted my MB and video card. =P

Well before that patch, everything was working fine. After the patch, the game would just reboot at random places, random times and no way to figure out a cause to the problem besides assuming its cause was the patch itself.

Im coming to the conclusion that the radeon 9700m was running so hot that it just was shutting the system down.

So i tried to reformat/reinstall everything in the slim hopes that might help. And i went with the Omega 2.12 drivers because it offered hope to use the cat 2.12 on my mobility card. Well i was still getting the reboots. Well low and behold, my wife was trying to play the game today when she got rebooted.

when the computer came back up it froze up instantly. She tried to reboot manually 2 or 3 times. to no avail but the same problem. Well on the last time, the thing broke.

now the machine wont post, when she hits the power button, the cap,num and scroll lock lights blink for a sec and turn off and nothing happens.

but for me this is going to be time consuming as I'm on a US base in Japan. So sending my laptop to dell to be fixed will be more of a issue for me.

any suggestions?

relictele · Answer

I think we're in the same boat - dead motherboard and/or secondary components.  You have some geographical headaches to be sure but if shipping your system out for MB replacement is the only option then I guess the sooner it ships out the sooner it's returned.   As I said in first post, I've owned quite a few Dells and installed/configured/administered a bunch more.  My time on the Latitude forum(s) the discussion usually centered on software related issues, with the odd component failure (sound card, video adapter) thrown in.  Most of the time the big problems are DLL/registry related and un-sticking the whole works can require a reinstall of Windows, drivers & apps.  We are not in that position, unfortunately.   It seems that the percentage of completely dead Inspiron systems, while small, is still big enough to warrant a healthy number of forum postings.  Let's assume that many folks whose system dies are not forum users and/or their only recourse is phone support since they have only 1 system that's currently DOA.   This is not a rip-Dell post but obviously I feel put out and the conspiracy theorist would read about the 'mystery delay/recall' of the original batch of XPS/9100 systems and start saying 'hmmmmm....'

relictele · Answer

Final (?) update: motherboard was replaced today and this is being written on my revived system.

A little scary/strange that two major (the majorest!) components would fail within 2 weeks of each other but fingers crossed this is the last posting on this subject/incident.

I maintain my fear/suspicion about these units but it's my dog, Charlie Brown, so I live with it.

Chebar · Answer

look at message from user lucas2004...

relictele · Answer

>>ook at message from user lucas2004.. Sorry, but I've searched on that name, on '2004' and on 'lucas' and come up with nothing. How 'bout a link or quote the pertinent info?

Chebar · Answer

this is a even better one:   http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=cc_order_status&message.id=102740#M102740

Chebar · Answer

sorry http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=cc_order_status&message.id=102813

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