fourells5 5 step process seemed to work for my laptop.  The laptop still locks-up every week but at least it no longer happens every day.

Downgrading to the 32-bit version of Vista might be the answer - I can't run Netflix Play Instantly and plenty of other software thanks to the 64 bit software so there may have other upsides as well.

Between Dell's hardware/laptop design flaws, Vista headaches, and the hours I have spent trying to get the laptop to work right, I must say purchasing this laptop was a bad decision.  I've warned off a couple of friends from buying it.

Hi all:

As most of you, I've been having this problem for some time as well.  Recently I decided to experiment a bit.  I removed the battery as this seemed to be the source of my problems and so far 2 days solid w/ no lock ups.  I'm starting to wonder if Dell may have another batch of bad batteries going again.  Now for a laptop of this size and portability this solution is not acceptable.  We should not have to remove the battery in order to function normally.  I hope that this helps some one out there w/ this issue!!

Jim

Good to see some folks are having success... although a laptop that only works when plugged into the power outlet is a worrying sign.

My laptop has deteriorated significantly.  It now crashes repeatedly with every use.  Dell asked me to run a hardware diagnostic (start the computer by pressing FN + Power) - unfortunately the machine stalls 5 minutes into the 15 minute test.  They were going to call me back tonight, but I am still waiting for a call that was supposed to come 2.5 hours ago.

I find this quite interesting. As my laptop don't have the freezing problem anymore, I have no way of confirming it unfortunately.

HI all.

Could you all try updating to BIOS rev A07 and post back how it goes, please?

It worked! Or it has thus far - I'll let you know if the laptop comes down again over the weekend when ill be using it extensively. I have yet to have a freezing issue since installing A07.

On a side note - did Dell just not do enough beta testing on this one before releasing it or what? It feels like I was the beta tester for there BIOS updates.

And I attempted to contact the Dell support to get my main account on these forums reset so it would unlock itself. I've looked everywhere trying to find a 1-800 number for forum support or website support with no luck. I called customer support and after getting punched through to the operator they transfered me to customer support (go figure!). Customer support transfered me to technical support (without ever hearing what my actual issue was) which then gave me "this department is currently closed - please call back again tommorw" then promptly disconnected me.

Ok, rant over. Can you provide me with a 1-800 number for Dell website technical support? Preferably someone who speaks english as a first language?

Based on this experence with this laptop I am very unlikey to ever come back to Dell again in the future unless they make it worth my wild. Between the issues with the laptop and the customer service debacle this is becoming rediculious.

*Note that this is rlp340 - posted on rlp341 well because of what I said above

BIOS rev A07 is not working for me. The Dell Flash Utility v. 125 (with Current System BIOS information: BIOS rev A06) says that it "cannot continue because...1. no battery!!!"

I am currently in safe mode with networking right; blue screen appears after showing the login screen. I checked Bugcheck in the Event Viewer  and it highlights  the stop code as follows:

0x0000007f (0x00000008,0x80154000, 0x000000000, 0x0000000000)

Checked online and haven't found any cites to this stop code.

A bit of background: The problem has been building for awhile I guess. I brought my Dell home on May 1, 2009. No problems the first week. The second week I began having freezing problems. First, the mouse would just freeze; then, if I were playing music, the music would stop skipping. Only disconnecting all power sources worked (before I found out about the holding power button down option).

The freezing problem seems to occur immediately after a Windows update automatically occurs. I believe this because I checked the Event Viewer and all of the "Error" occured after a Windows Update Install.

Help?

HI all.   Could you all try updating to BIOS rev A07 and post back how it goes, please?

_______________________________________________________________________________

And I attempted to contact the Dell support to get my main account on these forums reset so it would unlock itself. I've looked everywhere trying to find a 1-800 number for forum support or website support with no luck.

________________________________________________________________________________

I know it's not very intuitive, but if you click on the "Report Abuse" link in your thread, you can explain the problem with your locked account there. One of our tool admins will get the message and work with you to get it sorted out.

Optimistic,

0x7F indicates faulty or mismatched RAM in most cases. MSDN has a good description. I would start by reseating both memory modules, and watching for a blue screen in normal mode. If it happens again, I would remove one module at a time and try to isolate which is the problem module. Service manual here to guide you throug swapping out the RAM.

Also, I highly suggest you do not attempt to flash the BIOS again until we have this blue screen issue sorted out. Once we stop the blue screens we are going to have to address the No Battery message.

So, I wanted to follow up on DELL-Bill B's advice. The 0x7f bug code fixed itself, but another popped up after that, 0x7e (0x0000007e) along with the driver specification, SRTSPL.SYS .

This is a problem that hadn't been identified for any Dell Studio XPS 13's. I eventually found a thread at the Symantec forum about the possible incompatibility of new Dell products (in their case, Dell E6500 that came out Jan/Feb 2009) and Symantec Endpoint Protection MR4 (11.0.4000). The solution to this problem is to either upgrade to SEP MR4 MP1A (11.0.4014) or completely uninstall SEP.

In my case, I had to do the latter because my school (from whom I'd gotten the SEP MR4 software) did not have the upgrade patch yet. My problem was further complicated by the fact that I was only able to start the PC in Safe Mode, where Windows Installer for SEP was disabled. The tactic that worked was stopping Symantec Endpoint Protection from starting up using msconfig. See the Symantec KB document, How to Manually Uninstall Symantec Endpoint Protection. The first step describes how to do this.

After disabling SEP at startup, you should be able to access normal mode. From there, you can uninstall SEP through the Control Panel's Program and Features module. If a blue screen still appears, then complete the full uninstallation process as prescribed in the Symantec KB document.

I will admit that I was completely in the dark as I went through all this, so I did a manual uninstallation first (after trying a whole bunch of other things that made the rest of my programs dysfunctional), restored the PC to the point right before the blue screen of death, stopped SEP from starting up with msconfig, and then uninstalled SEP  through the Control Panel's Program and Features module. Needless to say, this was a tiring and LONG process. But my system is completely functional now. I'm only a couple of hours out from completing the process, so we'll see!

Hope this is helpful to someone out there!

--
Dell Studio XPS 13, Intel Core 2 Duo, P9600 @ 2.66GHz, 4GB, Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Right after I posted my previous post about the battery removal I tried the A06 BIOS revision and at first everything seemed great!  Then 2 days afterward when switching between battery power and A/C adapter it froze AGAIN!  Not 2 days after this was there a post on BIOS A07...all I can say is ever since the post and using this little baby I have had NO troubles at all!  Lock up totally gone!  I have this puppy running nearly 48 hrs straight, w/ no troubles.  I have run a game (BioShock), run tweetdeck, email, IE8, everything runs w/out a hitch!  And might I add BioShock looked and played great!!  Thanks Bill!  I'm hoping at this point that this will solve most people's problems.  I will let you all know a bit more after my Seattle trip in June-July when I really put this laptop through it's paces!

Same! It seems to be running fine. I had it running all weekend without any freezing or any other issues. Thanks for the bios update :)

has anyone has this problem aside from freezing? the hotkeys also freeze and not work.

i've posted on the thread with this title calling on dell but no dice from dell admin.

Laptop Studio XPS Hotkeys Not working

Laptop Studio XPS Hotkeys Not working

No. But I have heard of others having this issue. If I remember right, the people that did have the issue ended up sending their computers back to Dell to get a replacement.

Same issue here (and judging by a quick google, we're not alone in this, in fact those without any lock up problems are in the minority). Dell have already replaced the hard drive - and I've found out this morning on closer examination that they've replaced it with a different spec drive (replaced my SCSI with a SATA - I know there shouldn't be that much of a difference but the Vista performance rating has dropped from 6.1 to 5.4 for the HDD which is very significant). It's now crashing more than ever before. Last night it took 8 attempts to keep the thing running long enough to install office 2007.This morning it's crashed 4 times trying to install critical windows updates. In the past few weeks I've formatted and reinstalled the OS 8 times - believe me, this is a pain when you have to then install all you other applications on top; I've basically lost 3 weekends in having to do this.

So the engineers are on their way tomorrow to replace the hard drive, motherboard and cooling systems. :emotion-6:

What gets me goat rather more is that despite statutory uk consumer laws, Dell are flat refusing to replace the system under any circumstances. Not to worry - if it continues to die after they've replaced the hardware mentioned above and they still refuse to replace, I'll just take them through the small claims court.