I'm with the rest of you now: BIOS A07 and the new NVIDIA driver update.  So far there hasn't been any crashing at all, but I just did the update on Sunday.  I am running the computer in high performance mode and it's good though, which is hopeful since I used to have to keep it on AC power in power saver mode.  I'm also having luck while running on battery power.  *fingers crossed*  Still running Windows Vista 64-bit Home Premium as well.  If this stops the freezing/crashing I'm afraid to update to Windows 7 because I won't want to change anything (after updating countless drivers that, if anything, made the freezing more frequent).  On a side note, I'm running Windows 7 in Virtual Box (Sun) and it doesn't seem too different from Vista anyway (I'm just assuming Microsoft fixed Vista's problems and re-named it).  Shaking the windows to minimize them is something touchpad users can probably live without.  

I'll update here if the new drivers are successful, or if I wind up with the problem those of you with the freezing at random times once a month or so are having.

well there you have it, my posts were deleted :( hmm.

Dell needs to release a new stable firmware, ASAP.  I just found this thread.  I had problems from day one w/ the 1340 and bios A06 so I immediately deleted Vista 64bit and install Ubuntu 9.04.  Freezing and lockups still occured but less frequently.  I updated to A07 and lockups happened less than A06 but still does happen.  I was hoping that they had iron out all the problems so I just went back to Vista 64bit yesterday and of course, nothing has been solved and there are still lockups.  If only the M1330 had gigabit ethernet, I would never had upgrade(cough, cough) to the 1340..  What a mistake that was.  I'm gonna try the 32bit Vista from my other Dell and see if that solves any of the problems.  If it does, I'm gonna contact Dell and demand the COA and media for 32bit Vista.

Oh yeah, the mods here will delete any message where mention anything legal.

I tried to get them to give me a differnet model they won't do it.  They won't give me a refund either this unit was brought at the end of May.  I can just hope that this will work it will if by slim chance it's the processor or they have new parts in the unit.  Somebody I know downloaded something called the Lemon law for computers and it's true.  If this unit does not work I'll will prsue in getting my money back Via lemon law

I've been following this thread from time to time and I believe I am having very similar problems. My 1340 laptop (which came mid-April) has been randomly freezing. Before doing any updates it would freeze every 5 hours or so (i.e. very rarely) and when it did, the screen would not respond to anything (nor would the keyboard lights). Although on battery it frooze almost instantly. With the updates it seems to crash far more frequently and on the A07 BIOS update it can freeze after 2 minutes or after an hour (and the same when running from the battery - i.e. better on battery than before but worse when plugged in than before). While I had it on the A08 it was much worse so I went back to the A07. With the NVIDIA update which made it stay in the save power mode all the time - when it crashed, instead of the screen staying static, there would be a set of beautifully coloured horizontal lines and most of the screen being black with some of the screen visible. I am not sure if this indicates a video card issue or not. Although the freezing seems completely indiscriminate (I am 99.9% sure it hasn't got anything to do with heat) it does seem to always freeze when copying large files to/from my external HDD. Although there will be times when the laptop lasts 30 minutes or so no matter how many dozens of times I try to copy this one 6GB file (which should only take a few minutes) it will always freeze. I have tried running it without the battery in and that doesn't work as it did for one person. I have downloaded and installed all the updates available and none help the situation. I also tried to work Process Explorer & Manager and although I consider myself to be a relatively advanced computer user I just couldn't work the programs out to be able to figure out what exactly is causing it to freeze. Hopefully someone at Dell can try testing one of the faulty laptops to figure it out. To be honest, considering how long this problem has been known about, I'm surprised it hasn't been figured out yet. Despite all that, when the laptop is started in safe mode (incl. networking too) the laptop works fine (obviously without audio capability etc.). I require it to run a program called ArcMap so I now have it always starting in safe mode with networking. It lasts all day and night and I can copy as many large files as I want. I can listen to music (and run my softphones etc.) on my trusty 3 year old Acer which was only replaced because it would crash when running ArcMap after a while. I have vowed never to buy a VIAO after one gave up on my within a year and I will do the same for Dell (this is my first and only Dell). I can't believe the only laptop brand I trust is Acer, not to say I won't try others. I paid a fortune to have the CompleteCare thing but as I bought the laptop in Canada and I am in the UK for the next 2 and a bit months I have to wait until Dell can release a fix for this which I hope is soon. Otherwise it would be nice to know that just in case that doesn't happen does anybody know if the new 1340s suffer from this? I will be asking for a replacement if it isn't fixed by September.

I've had the same exact problem when I copy and paste from the DVD burner to the hard drive or external device in my case it was a hard drive and flash drive it would freeze.  I've had the drive, motherboard, and memory replaced.  Nothing worked.  I also sent it in and it came back worse with vista sp2 but I am still having the same problem.  I am now getting a new one I don't have much faith in this new unit (that I didn't get yet) hopefully I will be in for a pleasant suprise if it was the processor.  I personally think we should try a differnet manufautre dvd burner it's the only thing to try.  If this one does not work I will enforce the lemon law on this laptop. 

Alot of interresting things are going on now.

While Bill over here is communicating constructively with me to get a proper replacement, the previous dell technical support coach/manager is calling me and telling me about refurbished parts and refusing to replace the laptop or send any new parts.

He didnt sound friendly at all, infact he doesnt even let me talk and kept on talking without stopping even interrupting while I was talking. He sounded quite rude and told me that He will send this to customer escallations/relations/legal department to take care of this.

Oh and he asked me if I am claiming that all of the millions of XPS's sold are defective?

I sent an email to him with the URL for this thread and he's telling me that "there's only one customer affected by this in this thread". At which point I thought, has he even read this thread properly?

While i'm quite thankful for bill over here for atleast being polite/courteous, I never thought that when I bought dell i would have to go through all this. sadly, it is quite dissapointing and unfortunately for dell, they are going to lose more customers.

hi there,

My messages are constantly being deleted...
So I´ll write it again... I changed to modded beta drivers from videolaptop2go and installed them on Windows 7 beta..

Ever since I did this I did not get a single crash anymore. in my previous situation (fresh install of added vista home OEM and standard driver from Dell) I could not even play a game for more than 10 minutes.

This will probably get this message deleted again but: The dell drivers are really bad!!!

Though what I notice is that a lot of people seem to have slightly different issues here...So i'll write down when mine crashed:

- My laptop never crashed while running in power savings mode. Only when using both videocards
- It was impossible to play games.
- I experienced once that it crashed while copying a large file over the network.
- It seemed to crash a lot when I was downloading from newsgroups. But I wouldn't be able to say in which powermode I was at those moments.

I really hope this info is usefull to some people having the exact same issue...

I didn't try the modded drivers on Vista, so I don't know whether the Win7 thing is really needed...

Regards,

Xanh

I agree re: the Macbook, I was just illustrating that they have the same basic hardware and are not experiencing the same problems we are. The XPS is a stunning value compared to the overpriced Macbook, but data loss completely mitigates that.

Rasikajay,

That is unfortunate. I really hope he reads through this thread properly. We spent close to $100k on Dell Server hardware last year and currently have a quote in hand for a $66k blade and storage upgrade. While I understand that they are separate divisions, we bought an XPS which is supposed to be the cream of the crop. I bought my XPS through my business rep too, so shouldn't that afford a bit of attention to this matter?

I only use my laptop for a few hours a day and usually in power-savings mode to reduce the ridiculous heat the laptop puts out. I never run with Hybrid SLI enabled, so perhaps that's why I don't have the frequency of problems some of you have, but I definitely have experienced everything you all have. Multiple hard locks, some resulting in complete OS corruption, some resulting is BIOS checksum errors causing all my BIOS options to reset to default. I'm sure I'll run with Hybrid SLI enabled with Diablo 3 is released though, so I'm hoping this is fixed by then.

Kudos to Bill for stepping up in this frenzy of upset customers. That's not an easy task no matter how you look at it.

For now, I'm keeping an eye on this thread because if I experience another hard lock resulting in data loss, I'm going to push for a return or exchange for a different model. FYI, the new Macbooks use the exact same internal hardware almost (nVidia MCP97) as our XPS 13's, but don't suffer the same issues.

I've been watching this thread too and I get emails of the posts popping up in my inbox every so often.  I'm still not experiencing problems since my latest upgrade and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  However, for those of you in the US, I did happen to speak with a computer "geek squad" employee the other day at Best Buy concerning this problem.  He said that they will look at your machine and give you a new one if they are unable to determine what is wrong with it.  Like I said, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed because I don't want to re-install software -- but maybe those of you in the US who purchased this at Best Buy could benefit from the knowledge.  Apparently, you don't need any special warranty as long as you bring it back soon enough.  I bought mine at the end of May and apparently that is a short enough time.

As for the Macbook... I may be biased as a PC user, but it seems to me that if you want any decent components in a Mac you have to spend a small fortune and $800 won't get you a Mac with these components.

You have to search for the Aluminum Macbook Pro's as they have the MCP97 chipset. And posts from 2006 don't count. :) I'm not saying the Macbook's don't have issues, but my sister has two of the new ones and the heat isn't nearly as bad. It's close to my XPS 13 running with Dell Extended Battery Life enabled under Windows 7.

What has me more concerned is the data loss and BIOS corruption issue. Do you think that's related to heat Bill? That seems plausible as most folks in this thread are reporting it occurs more frequently when Hybrid SLI is enabled.

Data lost from the HD. I had my OEM Vista install corrupt itself as well as an Ubuntu 9.04 installation immediately after a hard lock. I wound up reinstalling Vista from the DVD as I lost the service partition too.

I had similar problems with my Dell XPS 1330. I first noticed that the fan was repeatedly changing from the highest setting to off every 5 seconds or so. Along with this annoying problem, my computer would often freeze during times when I had a few windows open. The freezing was usually accompanied with odd vertical lines on the screen (sometimes colored and sometimes not). These odd lines, like something out of the matrix, also appeared sometimes when I tried to turn m computer on immediately following a freeze. After it bacame apparent that this problem was persistent and not just a fluke of having too many apps running at once, I decided to call
Dell Tech Support. The first associate directed me to the support.dell.com website in order to download the new video card driver for the NVIDIA 8400. My computer seemed to be working ok after that (i.e. not freezing every 30 minutes) but since I paid about $2000 for this laptop, I was still a little frustrated at the constant on and off of the fan. I once again called Dell Tech Support (I shouldn't even capitalize that) and the second associate danced around the problem and even had me install GoToAssist so that she could take control of my laptop in order to "fix" the problem. Though I continually mentioned that the fan was turning on and off repeatedly, none of the associates seemed to focus on that.

Anyway, this all culminated when just as I was typing 'XPS 1330 fan on and off' into the google searchbar, my computer froze again with those stupid lines all over the screen. I turned off my computer and tried to turn it back on. No Dell logo. Just lines. Again I powered off. And again I turned the laptop on. And again those lines were on the screen where the Dell logo usually resides. I was beginning to think this was a sick joke that God was playing on me. Anyway, eventually my laptop cooled down enough (through no help of its own fan) so that i could at least get windows to boot up. By this time, I had given up on dell tech support (note the lack of capitalization...which will probably get this post banned) so I once again googled 'XPS 1330 fan on and off'. Viola! This beautiful link pops up:

www.evanclosson.com/devlog/dellxpsm1330fanstuttering

Apparently many people have had the same sorts as problems as I, though tech support seemed utterly clueless about this rampant problem within the XPS M1330 community. From this link, I was directed to download the new bios update from support.dell.com (click on drivers and downloads, then BIOS, then version A15 for me) and my fan and my computer have been running fine ever since...*crosses fingers*

I know how you feel. If I didn't have so much invested in this dell clunker I would switch to a Macbook Pro in a heartbeat. My roommate has one and everytime he's gone I use his because it's so much more convenient.