XPS M1330 HELP!!!

[Gaki]

Okay, so I really need help with this but I'm not sure if anyone will be able to help me.

I'm a Junior in college now and Freshman year my father bought me an XPS M1330, model number PP25L. It runs on Windows Vista Ultimate.

For the past few years it has had this problem where it wants to install an update (NEVER THE SAME UPDATE) and when it does, it refuses to start up again. I've been continuously told by the support staff to reinstall my operating system and I must have done so at least six to eight times already. Finally it told me that it wouldn't reinstall my system anymore because of some configuration that was "lost" or something, so Dell sent me a new hard drive.

TWO WEEKS after having this new hard drive and doing nothing but play Pandora Radio on the laptop (and I literally mean nothing else) it did the same thing after installing an automatic update. It just continuously turns on over and over and over again unless you stop it. You can't even get it to turn on in Safe Mode because it never gives you the option.

Tech refused to help me and literally brought me to tears. He told me I had a virus. (Ummm, what?) He told me my two options were to reinstall my operating system or get a new hard drive AGAIN.

I'm just so confused, I haven't done anything with it because I was so angry with the tech and I'm currently using a five year old HP from my brother in law.

Just to note: I don't have the money for Windows 7 and I certainly don't have the money for a new computer. The XPS IS still under a hardware warranty but not under a software warranty.

Can anybody help? I'm writing a letter to the company but I really don't know if they'll even bother with me at this point.

[Geek King]

Well, there are two things I can see that have reasonable chances of happening.

1) You've been unlucky, or Dell's hard drive quality is not so hot, and you got two bad drives that dropped sectors. Not unheard of if a bad batch of drives went out. A new drive may actually fix the issue. You may want to request they send you a different make of drive than the last two, if possible.

2) (less likely) You are having some issues with the updates for some oddball reason. Will your programs run without the OS updates? It is not ideal, but you might be better to run it with the updates turned off, or maybe just manually install just the service packs.


I will note that most modern viruses don't want to stop your computer from running. They either want to sell you junkware, use your computer for zombie emails/file sharing, or spy on your network usage and passwords. A virus just crashing a computer is pretty rare these days, unless someone is specifically targeting you. Of course, that doesn't preclude poorly written viruses that accidentally ruin the computer.

[Imprl59]

Here's what I would try assuming your install is shot at this point

Reinstall Vista again from your CD

Once up and online go to the Dell webiste and manually update the Bios and all the drivers

Download and install SP1

Download and install SP2

Use the auto update to get the rest of the updates. Keep running it over and over until is says there are no more updates.

While yiou are doing all these updates keep an eye on the system log.
Start
Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Event Viewer
System
You are looking for disk errors in that log file. If you see any the hard drive is going to fail. Windows typically knows that a hard drive is failing long before it actually fails but for reasons known only to Microsoft it doesn't telll you and the info is burried five layers deep where you will never see it.

Don't get upset over the Dell support. It has nothing to do with you, they just SUCK. They read from a script and if your problem strays from the script you are just out of luck. I can't think of anyone I would less like to deal with.

[pitchpole]

If you get absolutely frustrated you might want to try bringing it to some of the computer science majors on your campus (if there are any). If you find one who like a good challenge you might get it fixed for nothing. If your campus has an ACM (association for computing machinery) chapter, that's be a good place to start. I know my uni's ACM members were generally interested in any unique problems that came their way.

[It's me]

Make sure that the BIOS is up to date. Also, once you have a functioning installation go to the Dell web site and download and install the most recent versions of all of the drivers for your machine (video, sound, chipset etc.).

[Gaki]

Thanks for all your input guys, my father just recently got it to run in Safe Mode (he's a miracle worker or something) and he's been working with it but turns out my fan is dead and it's been overheating the motherboard for the last couple months when it's been on. So I've had to keep it on its side standing up when it's running but I'm not using it. It's getting so hot it's ridiculous.

I think at this point it's just time to tell them the thing is fried from being excessively hot since the fan is broken AND THAT is a hardware issue and they HAVE to fix it because I still have a warranty. :\ I still don't feel better about it.

I didn't really notice because really, who notices the fan turning on? And I haven't noticed it getting hot because it ALWAYS felt hot to me (I have a disorder where my hands are always really cold so everything feels warm to me.)

[charred]

http://consumerist.com/