Baffled by Dell Inspiron 17R N7010! Can't figure out problem!

[Jason9922]

I came upon a Dell Inspiron 17R N7010 about six months ago that looked brand spanking new, but when plugged in wouldn't power up at all. I imagine it was the motherboard, but I am unsure what was wrong because when I sent it to my repair guy, me and him worked out a deal and I never asked him details after getting them back. I was just hyped that it powered on and I could see it boot up for the first time! After it booted with no HDD in it I turned it off and then installed 8GB of DDR3 1066 ram and a 120GB SSHD to go with the 500GB 7200rpm hdd that I plan to put in place of the optical drive using the simple optical drive caddy. So now that I have the ram and hard drive physically installed into the notebook it was time to put in the Windows 7 64 bit disc and boot it up for the install. I started it up and immediately F2'd my way into the BIOS to check everything out. I made a few adjustments like setting it to boot from the optical drive (which is still in there until I'm done using installation discs) and I made a few other adjustments. I even went through and ran diagnostic tests on the SSHD and the memory which is something I rarely do.

 

All was well and the laptop sat running this stuff fine for awhile and may I add that it ran the diagnostics SUPER fast when the SSHD was in it compared to when I ran the diagnostics with several other hard drives. Once I rebooted and it starts to go into setup mode or run in Windows in any way I get what some call the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH or BSOD for short. Sometimes I can make it a few minutes into the setup and other times I get the BSOD as soon as the DVD starts to do its thing. I have tried different ram, different hard drives, different chargers. I've taken the entire thing apart and everything including the motherboard functions and tests correctly. I'm assuming that means it's software. Every time I get the BSOD it's a different error so again I'm assuming that's something software. The screen says that if you've installed any new software to replace that etc. and it also says to contact Dell to get the info for what needs to be done if you've put a new motherboard in which I think my repair guy might have done. I'm not sure if he replaced it. I was told the power jack was broke when I got it and I just put a note on it when I sent it to my repair guy saying the power jack was bad. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

[chazzy2501]

have you tried disabling any internal hardware from the bios and or reducing it's functionality like compatibility ide mode disable wifi card (or remove it just for the install) turn off the serial port or internal sound (if you have those options). Use a single stick of ram to start disable cpu features etc. You may be able to get bios or firmware fixes for these things?

 

EDIT are you using a hookey copy of Windows? maybea DEP issue:) Or a different copy of windows 7 incase the media is bust.. You can also put the win7 installer on a usb (it's faster)

Edited June 7, 2013 by chazzy2501