Dead Machine

Received my E1705 last night (1.66 core duo, 256mb Nvidia, 512 ram 100gb HD). Booted it up no problem and was looking over the settings. I checked the DPI to ensure it said 96 and then BOOM, blue screen of death...told me to reboot the machine and when I did, after the black Win XP loading screen, all I got was a flickering screen (on/off) which lasted for about one minute then it went all black, followed by the BSofD. It said there was a problem with either the video card or the driver.

So I ran Dell's diagnostic tool and it came up with a read/write error on the video card memmory.

Fast forward to this morning, called Dell's Tech support and after running some tests they told me to perfom a system restore via the restore partition. Ok so we do that then after its done the system hangs at the Welcome to Windows screen.....by now I am more than upset.

Then the Dell guy tells me that they will have to send me the OS disks (will take 2 days) so I can re-try to load the OS ( as he said my HD image must be corrupt)...then they will be able to continue to try to diagnose the video problem.

I tell them that two problems with a machine that has only been running for 15 minutes is 2 to many and I want an exchange.........

Now they have me waiting for the "executive team" to get back to me to tell me if I am eligible for an exchange or not.


I don't know guys....very unhappy right now........if I had not gotten such a great deal using those coupons, I would have returned it already.....

Any ideas?

Thanks

For the first 14 minutes I definately agreed with you....but right know it is a 7.7lb brick on my desk.

Just got off the phone with Dell Customer Support and they processed the exchange and I should get it in 3 to 5 days. Not to bad, but most fustrating dealing with the Technical Support people.

Thanks. Like I said the worst part is that the Tech support people make you feel that it is you that is wrong and that you must do all of the diagnosing. In my mind if a PC/laptop is delivered and one part has failed, then as they are trying to diagnose it another part fails.....Hmmmmm bad pattern developing there. They still wanted me to wait two days for disks to try again.

It was not until I called customer service and expressed how dissatisfied I was that the item only worked for 15 minutes that something was done......

Oh well, here's hoping the replacement works better.

Here is the error message I received when I ran the video test via Dell diagnostics (fn+f12).


VESA SVGA VIDEO - video memory test : Fail
error-code: 5300-0119
msg: Detected a failure while writing and reading video memory. Video mode: Dh(320x200x16). Address A0CD0h expected to read 0h, but read FFFF0000h instead.

Doing a search on that error code brings up a few threads, two in particular from the Dell forum and looks to have resolved by replacing the video card............