We've purchased two batches of Precision 370 workstations.  The first batch shipped with 3.6GHz CPU's.  We built up our standard image from a fresh install of the system.  Users began reporting that their systems were locking up randomly.  Internet Explorer would actually start to consume 99% of the CPU in most cases and you'd be unable to kill the iexplore.exe process, or any other process for that matter.  It would require holding in the power button to cause a hard reboot.  I spent quite a bit of time trying to diagnose the issue including updating drivers, BIOS, firmware, as well as doing a fresh install of XP (not using our system images), etc...  Nothing seemed to work.

 

A few months later we purchased some more only the 3.6 option was no longer available so we chose 3.4 instead.  Using the same image, these systems don't seem to have any problems whatsoever.  Out of pure curiosity I tried swapping out processors between the two types of systems.  So I swapped a 3.4 from an unused system into one of the 3.6 machines (EVERY 3.6 has this issue).  It's been 2.5 weeks now and the user has reported that they haven't had it freeze at all in that time.

 

So I have a few questions:

 

1) Is there a known issue with certain configurations using the 3.6GHz chip, at least in the Precision 370 model?

 

2) If not, I'm VERY curious why Dell chose to remove that model from their lineup.  Usually you offer faster processors a few months later, not slower ones.  It makes me wonder.

 

3) Is there any plausible reason to suspect something other than a faulty CPU?  I truly suspected it was just a software compatibility issue that I wasn't catching until I did the swap.  I'm unsure how it could be caused by software when by simply changing the CPU and ONLY the CPU resolves the issue.

 

Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated.