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Dell 6400 issues/who will be my savior?

post #1 of 2
9/23/08 at 5:46am
Thread Starter 
Ok,am here weeping I have been battling issues on my laptop for 8 weeks. I use my latop for a while and then it suddenly crashes and when i rebbot it becomes a bit slow and gets worse each time i reboot the system. Also the audio becomes all garbled,both when windows starts and even when i play videos or mp3s. So i thought it was a virus i fought so hard,but it i was never a ble to resolve the issue. So everytime it happens i format the system. And everything is okay for like a week. For a time i noticed that when io installed firefox 3.0,it becomes slow.so i removed and all was fine for a while. Now its started again. I have formatted my pc for almost 9 times. Downlaoded all the drivers from dell.com I installed only lan and vga drivers. Got kaspersky antivirus 2009,updated ran a scan,no virus. Bought a new memory card,chnaged my hard drive. But this still happens. I am tired someone please help., I use windows xp,sp2,1 gb memory card. My laptop is dell 6400 inspiron.
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post #2 of 2
9/23/08 at 8:14pm
When your audio starts becoming garbled. That generally means your SATA controller has had to switch from DMA to PIO mode. PIO uses the processor to handle I/O requests to memory rather than the drive just doing I/O straight to RAM. The audio crackling you're hearing is actually skipping as the CPU interleaves I/O operations with sound processing operations.

Since your PIO problems keep coming back after repeated reformats I would say your drive is suffering from rampant I/O errors. In fact Windows will switch from DMA to PIO mode if the controller is reporting alot of I/O errors.

My suggestion to you is to get your data backed up IMMEDIATELY and look into getting your hard drive replaced. If you're under warranty run the Dell diagnostic utility and run the Hard Drive diagnostics. Call technical support and inform them of any errors. If the test comes up clean (it very well might) You may have to convince tech support the issue is with the hard drive.
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