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One week old XPS 400 BIOS PROBLEMS!!!
Ok.. Like most people on here, I wanted to finally upgrade from the hunk of junk that I had to a decent new comptuer. Thus I hopped on the XPS bandwagon and bought a new XPS 400. All seemed fine and holy with the computer for awhile until I started to get the lastest and greatest upgrades for it. Thats when a major problem came my way... The comptuer came with the BIOS version "A00" from Dell and I noticed that on the website Dell has the newer "A02" BIOS available. No genious needs to figure out that the latest BIOS is usually the better one. So I download it and install. Next thing I know.. The whole system is in FRAGED state! First, when the comptuer re-starts after installing the latest BIOS, I get the blue screen of death, with memory dump going on... So I re-start. (Power off, Power on) And the same thing happens again as soon as the comptuer passes the inital start-up screen.... Nautraly, by then I could tell that the newest BIOS was causing problems, so I reverted back to the origional one.. "A00"
Is anyone else having this problem with the latest and greatest BIOS? (Also, I called Dell XPS tech support... Not much of a soultion there.. The genious on the phone suggested trying to install the BIOS with a floppy disk!! Hmm.... What change will that make to the end result... Perhaps NONE except make it a little easier to revert back to the origional BIOS?) I love Dell comptuer tecs... *SIGH*..
XPS 400
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Intel Pentium D (3.0 GHz)
ATI Radeon x600SE (256 MB)
2 GB DDR2 RAM
Anyone out there able to help me out or confirm this problem?
- our systems are identical (except that I only have 1Gb of RAM). My system came with one SATA drive and I installed two more IDE later (next to 2 optical drives). I had no problems updating the BIOS to A02 - strange. Hope you won't have this problem when there is a useful or necessary BIOS upgrade for you.good luck
- Yeah... Your right about the new BIOS now that I looked at what it updates... And the "If it ain't broke" part. :smileywink:I more or less sent this out to see if anyone else out there had any of the same results installing it. But to answer questions, the OS that came with the SATA drive is Win XP Media Center... I really think that there are may be some bugs in that system... I've had XP home and Professional for awhile on my laptop and my wife's system with little errors BIOS or Windows related that I've encoutered.. Just think it's strange that a manufactuer like Dell puts out a BIOS, then when you go to update, the system Frags it's self out... (Also thanks to that BIOS... I had some corrupt folders that I found during a Disc Check.... Corrected though..)Thanks for all the help though Hilmar.
ok, here goes my first post on this forum. I'm replying to this topic becasue i think it has something to do with the problems i am having with my new XPS 400 system (I belveive I'm runnin windows media OS)
First off i need to confess that i am by no means computer savy. i can use the programs and do basic installs and stuff, but when something doesn't work, i'm usually stuck..... so please keep my stupidity in mind if you reply to me with help ideas.....:smileyvery-happy:
I recevied two or three blue screens saying something about checking the BIOS and something about caching, and now i'm getting an error saying winlogon encountered an error and needs to close. This has typically been ocurring while installing programs. the latest one was Jasc Paint Shop Pro.
Does anyone have any suggestions? is this out of my league and time to call in an expert?
oh, and by the way, i am not impressed w/ Dells tech help at all........ what a let down.... there service reputation and my experience with them in teh past on my old machine is what made me buy another dell instead of going elsewhere.....
- Sounds to me like your having similar problems to what I have had with the BIOS update.. What BIOS version are you running with?
If you don't know how to find out, when you first turn on your comptuer, it displays the "Dell" logo, with a BIOS version below it.. It kinda "flashes" by on the screen, so you have to be quick to look at it... It should say either "A00" or "A02"As far as the programs and installing them, I have also had some troubles in installing programs, but I run into them more when I run programs and they crash.. I'm tending to believe that its the Windows Media Center OS and that it has many bugs in it..What I can suggest to you to correct the problems are the following...1) If your BIOS is version "A02" go to the dell support website.. Enter all the info for your comptuer.. (Service Tag, Computer Type, And all that good stuff...) then when it gets to the updates avaliable for the XPS 400, go to the BIOS. The page will show you that you can download the latest BIOS "A02".. Underneath that, it will show that other BIOS versions are avaiable that are older. Go to that, and from there download the "A00" BIOS.. From there it's pretty simple.. Re-install the old BIOS and see if that helps you..2) Run Disk Cleanup on your computer's hard drive, followed by a Check Disc on your hard drive. That will gaurntee that you don't have any corrupt files on your comptuer like I did... Disk Cleanup is pretty easy to get to.. Go to the start menu, program files, accessories, system tools, and then Disk Cleanup. That will just do a quick sweep of excess files and stuff that you don't really need on there..
To run Check Disc, go to the "My computer" icon on the start menu. Then on your hard drives, right click on your hard drive's icon. (Should be the "C" drive) After that go to "Properties" on the tab. From there it will bring up the basics of your hard drive. Go to the "Tools" tab. Then the top option will be to "Check for errors" ( IE: Check Disc) When you click that it will give you the option to automaticly correct errors and try to recover bad sectors. Check both boxes then click "Start". The comptuer SHOULD tell you that it requires you to re-start your comptuer, and from there just re-start.. When the comptuer comes back through it's initial startup, it will run Check Disc.. The total time for it is usualy in the hour to hour and a half range to complete and it's rather slow. So make sure that you do it when your not really needing to do anything on the comptuer for a little bit.. However it's IMPORTANT that you don't interupt it or turn the comptuer off while it's doing the check.. Doing so can possibly screw up the hard drive... (Learned the hardway in the past.. Trust me..) After the check disc is done, it should re-start again, and bring you right back into windows... Hopefully that will solve your problems..If this doesn't help.. Let me know and I have one or two other things you could try, but try these things first...Goodluck - Great. thanks for all the help.
I am running BIOS A00. should i still try and download a different one?
also, teh disc check thing. I think this may be what started by problem. the second week i had my computer, i was running a disc Defrag. i walked away from teh machine for awhle, and when i came back, the screen saver had turned on and locked up the computer. I then learned not to have a screen saver on while doing this. could this mean my hard drive is meesed up now? bhamburg, it could be many things that lead to a blue screen. first impression I have from your post is that it might be the memory. This happened to you on a basically fresh system. To check whether this is the memory there is a test utility somewhere but I forgot were it is. If you have two memory modules, I suggest taking out one and see if you still get the same problem. Then swap the modules and see if it behaves differently.
the last thing I would try is the BIOS. I don't think that is the case here.
a screensaver should not interfere with defrag. at least on my system that works fine. if you forced the system to reset/reboot you might have caused some bad files (I don't think you lost files).
btw. I have windows xp media center too and I haven't had a single problem with the OS yet. I therefore do not believe it has to do with the OS. Bluescreens normally indicate hardware problems, such as memory, device conflicts...
Message Edited by Hilmar on 11-29-2005 07:42 PM
Hilmar
64 Posts
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Posted November 27th, 2005 22:00
I did the same not long ago with no problems at all. I guess we need to know more about your system. My first guess would be settings in the BIOS relating to RAID or SATA. Is this still the same OS on a SATA drive the system shipped with?
Suggesting to upgrade the BIOS from a floppy is rediculous I think (especially if you got yours like mine with no floppy drive).
2. Updated SMBIOS tables to meet new specifications.
3. Improved USB support.
4. Improved BIOS flash support.
Message Edited by Hilmar on 11-27-2005 08:43 PM