I talked to dell tech support and they told me to change the boot sequence.When i went to the bios diskette drive was first,HDD was second and cdrom was third.So i change hdd to number one and its been fine ever since.As far as my black screen startups i usually hook my laptop to my hdtv via hdmi and leave it like that until shutdown.I guess the laptop got confused with the hdmi and the laptop moniter which caused this then again i could be wrong.If my laptop goes smooth for the rest of the weekend ill list my boot sequence order and see if it helps all u guys.

NEVERMIND! Its still the same.Today i booted up my laptop and it wouldnt even boot all the way.The dell screen at startup took forever,the status bar at the bottom took like 30 seconds compared to the usual 4 seconds and then i got a black screen with a prompt AND THEN! The alarm sounds go off.This laptop is startin to tickin me off and i dont know what to do.Dell better come with a fix for this problem or else im takin this ish back.

I had a series of problems that crept up on me during the course of today.  First certain keys stopped working unless you hit them several times.  Then the keyboard stopped repeating.  Then the touch pad stopped working.  And finally the media keys stopped working (which is why I'm posting this here).  Seven hours of registry probing, looking at bios settings, googling, rebooting, shutting down completely and leaving the laptop off for a while got me precisely nowhere.  Then I read above the suggestion of switching off and removing the battery.  Seemed daft, but I did it anyway.  The battery was only out for about 30 seconds, but when I put it back everything worked perfectly.  No BIOS changes at all.  As someone suggested, I guess that removing and putting the battery back caused some sort of cache flushing.  

Ive been using bruce's fix for a week and it's been fine ever since.Im hopin dell comes with a proper fix

help

i have the same problem. i just got a new 1535 and i updated to bios 05 from 04 and  now my media controls dont work at all now, also the eject light is always on but dosent eject.

    I have the same issue but I'm not sure. Can I know what is your laptop doing before KB/TP dead? playing games or system just idle?

    Someone says reboot can not fix it but only to remove battery and AC when the KB/TP is dead. Is that the same with yours? The fail after reboot is KB/TP dead when get into Vista or KB/TP will dead after some time working in Vista?

     I have calls with DELL, too. They told me flash BIOS to A05. After updating BIOS to A05, this fail symptom is gone forever on your laptop? Thanks for your reply.

My DELL Touch pad driver version is 7.1.104.2. Can I know what version is yours? thanks.

I'm really surprised with Dell. You call or chat with them and they suggest all these other things but they never mention the battery method.

They had me for an entire day installing drivers and updating the BIOS. Then when that didn't work they had me restore the factory default. That didn't work. They updated the BIOS again and that wasn't even needed because the previous update was still there even after the factory default restore.

Then they installed more drivers and nothing worked. Then they had me reinstall the Operating System. Needless to say after that my computer was not the same. Then I find out the battery trick on a blog.

I was extremely upset after three different technicians helped me do nothing.

Now I don't have the dell dock or anything like that. I had to spend another day reinstalling all of my software and not to mention all the files I lost and can't recreate.

Then the other day I noticed my Wifi wouldn't work. I don't use it that much but I was just checking it in town and it wouldn't work. Then the stupid problem started again. I had to take the battery out and couldn't use my computer until I got home.

Today I managed to fix the problem on my own. My wifi seems to be working and the light for it is lighting up again.

I just wish I knew something to do to prevent the problem from happening

My machine started itself up in the middle of the night and overheated in my back pack. It still works, but smells like melted plastic. I am really begining to hate this laptop.

I was going to say maybe you accidently bumped it on but that isn't possible. You can't turn it on when it is shut.

 

Last night mine made that alarm noise when I turned it on after downloading the updated drivers.

I turned it off and back on and it didn't do it again though.

But I do think it is turning off and on slower now.

Was your laptop off when it turned on or was it in sleep mode? Mine has done it as well but it only happned twice and both times my laptop was in sleep mode.

 

 

Yes, my laptop was off. I never put the laptop to sleep because windows has issues with that. I never even hibernate my machine. It is always turned off over night especially if it is going in my bookbag.

As I recall The problem is caused by Microsoft updates being set to check at 2 or 3am

 

Who set this as an intelligent default I do not know but you can change it at the windows update website screen

Hi,

I've read through all your posts as I have a similar problem with my Dell Studio 17.

Forgive me, as I am sure you have probably already answered but I dont understand anything technical about computers.

I turned my laptop on this morning and it started up as usual but the rewind icon stayed illuminated as you have stated your edject icons hace done.  It has been like it all day and I cannot listen to any music because it just skips through the tracks backwards not giving them a chance to play.  This obviously means it's still working, but I would like the others to work as well!

Could someone please give me a really simple idiots guide on how to solve this?  I've only this laptop since November and I'm really annoyed something has gone wrong so quickly.

 

Thank you