Forum OpenACS Q&A: dell can bite me

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1: dell can bite me
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 04/08/03 10:03 PM
I give up.  Dell TS refuses to believe there is any problem with my 1600 SC that locks up running memtest86, both with Dell's memory chip and Crucial's.  (Incidently, before it locks it reports errors at the same spot on both chips.  Hmm.)  So I'm shipping it back at my expense.  Beats getting stuck with a $600 paperweight.

First Dell tech told me to try running some program that looks like it tries to do something clever with Windows, because it reports NTLDR not found.  Second Dell tech gave me a Dell diagnostic that does a 10 minute memory test.  Now THAT's what I call thorough!

Screw it.

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2: Re: dell can bite me (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 04/17/03 05:23 PM
Jonathan, what did Dell tech. support say? Did they refuse to admit a problem with the hardware and replace the motherboard, or what? Or do all these motherboards fail memtest86 for some reason?

In my case the 10 minute diagnostic would be fine, if it's as carefull in those 10 minutes as memtest86 is, because all the errors occur in memtest86 in the first minute or three.

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3: Re: dell can bite me (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 04/17/03 05:55 PM
memtest86 reliably locked up in the first 5 minutes (beginning of the 3rd test--or fourth?--of the basic suite), after reporting errors at two locations in the first tests.  As I posted in the other thread, the errors stayed in the same location when I swapped out the memory dimm so I suspected a MB problem.  But, their test completed and reported no errors, and they wouldn't test memtest86 on any in-house system.  So basically I started out with higher faith in memtest86 than in Dell quality and they wouldn't going to lift a finger to confirm or dispel that.  Maybe they didn't have much faith in their hardware either. :0
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4: Re: dell can bite me (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 04/18/03 08:35 AM
Interesting. I believe it was tests 3 and 4 in memtest86 that generate the error on my system too, although I didn't write it down.

I wonder why the Dell support guy I talked to was happy to just ship me a new motherboard? Maybe just luck. He claimed he had no previous record of any such problem from anybody, but that could easily be true - just mis-classification and stuff getting lost in the shuffle at Dell. We'll see once it arrives...

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5: Re: dell can bite me (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 04/18/03 09:55 PM
I probably had a different MB... dual p4, onboard scsi.