The "silly, little" button is your e-button, i.e., an utterly useless piece of idiocy. And there appears to be NO way to make it into a restart button short of re-wiring the motherboard. It connects to what Intel calls a Metolious Vendor Defined Sensor. Dell has defined it to start Dell Support Center (if it isn't doing that either you have an older version of DSC - newer ones are posted on Downloads - or you have disabled the start-up program, mad.exe, which is necessary for the e-button to do its unnecessary job).

As for your more general problem: if the system is less than 30 days old, ship it back and demand that they re-ship it in accordance with your original order. If it is more than 30 days old, then grit your teeth, format, and do a clean install of your operating system (it sounds like ME!). That was the only way I could get things working half-decently with my 8100 (when I was running ME - since I switched to 2K, it has worked great; I haven't seen a blue screen for months!).

Bill Snyder

Groovy tip! Thanks!

De.

spiderfarmer,
Sounds like an awesome system.
If you will hold the power button down for 5-10 seconds then your system will turn off and you won't have to unplug it. As for the button wsnyder is right it is the e-button and as he said totally useless. Dell tends to ship their systems with so many items starting up at boot. You can go to Denny Denham's site and get what is and isn't necessary at startup. This will probably help the GPF's you're getting. Denny’s Site Here















































Sorry, your browser doesn't support Java(tm).


Message Edited on 09/07/01 03:29PM by TruthJustice

You can safely uninstall Dellnet and it will have no effect on IE. They are two separate and distinct pieces of software.

As for that useless *)^*&*% e-support button...


Joe

It's not a re-set button. It's a cap covering a hole in your machine.
The cap is worthless......the hole is'nt. I've considered many different uses for it. Pen holder for one.



D.M.

Dell Dimension 8100 Series
Pentium 4 Proc @ 1.4Ghz
512MB PC-800 RDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA-100 WD HD (7200RPM)
64MB DDR Geforce2 Ultra
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
NEC DV-5700A 12X DVD-ROM
Sony CRX-160E 12X8X32X CD-RW
250MB Iomega internal Zip drive
Klipsch Promedia 4.1 Speakers
IEEE 1394
Kodak DC-4800 Digital Camera
Canon ZR25MC Digital Camcorder
Windows Millennium
Adobe Photoshop 6.0
Bunch of other junk

Good to know, I was going to install 2k tomorrow...have it on my Alienware and Axis boxes and seem to have no issues, even with non-standard (read European release only) games. But, since I'll be darned if I can actually reach anyone in tech support, I'm not sure it matters.

Really, I spent 40 minutes on hold today...listening to some polite Indian woman telling me that it would just be a few more minutes. After I wasted my lunch "hour" waiting for tech support to answer the phone, I just gave up.

We're buying a few more boxes for dev work and gaming during off-hours. We need hefty, top of the line machines. My purchase was made because we're fairly heavily invested in Dell stock, but at this point, Alienware is winning on the support issues.

As much as I want to support Dell with more purchases, I can't really endorse sponsorship to a corporation which can't dedicate resources to answer it's phone or return tech support emails.

And frankly, I'm just annoyed that I don't have a reset button. What marketing idiot (original word here was M0r0n...but the filter wouldn't let me put that BAD word.) made that decision? I mean honestly, you know there were at least 10 hours of meetings dedicated to the decision of not having a reset button. Some idiot with an MBA said "No, no, customers don't need to reset OUR boxes...instead, map that button to a diagnostic system that will work with Win1995." And because they never let real techs into those meetings, you had a dozen people saying "oh yeah, what a great idea, let's totally change what consumers expect...and not tell them or advertise it. What a happy suprise it will be for all the power users."

Swear to god, next boxes, Alienware and AMD...at least they have reset buttons when your games go all flooey on ya.


Grumpily yours,

De. :)

Really? When I try, it gives me an alarm system error which says (and I'm paraphrasing) "If you unistall DellNet, it will unistall IE, which will make your system unstable." Or it said something like "all life will cease to exist if you click yes...do you want to continue? Click yes or no..."

I paraphrase, cause I haven't tried recently, so I'm working from memory...which in my case, is spotty at best...practicing to grow up to be a Senator, doncha know...well, I'm in TX, Grahmm is resigning...a girl has to plan...

Tomorrow, assuming I'm bored, I'll try again so I can post the actual message, instead of the art-school-goth-girl of doom interpretation. :)

But, and I'm not kidding, if I can't get a working reset button, I'm going to try for a grant which allows me to blow up my box on film....as long as someone will pay for my next big gaming machine...I say Plastique this baby and see what happens. :) Reset? I'll show you reset! :)

(It occurs to me that now I understand why none of my friends will let me near things which can be set on fire...cranky women and things that go boom...two things which do not go well together. :)

Lacking the fire to be pyrotechincally yours,

De.