Need help with home laptop before I shout at Dell again

[elsiegee40]

I bought an XPS 13 from Dell Outlet last month an d for various reasons haven't got round to setting it it up until the end of last week.

 

Itook McAfee off, installed MSE

Installed JRE and Flash

Installed iTunes

Installed Chrome

Installed Microsoft Office

 

Rebooted next day and it hung... no wifi, nothing would start except the Task Manager which had nothing going on, wouldn't shut down

 

Eventually got through to Dell support today.

Tried System restore from Safe Mode after which it wouldn't start at all.

Did a factory reset which reinstalls Win7

Applied Windows Update - 78 of them - rebooted and it hung on the way up.

They told me to force a shutdown.

Rebooted and all seemed well, but then discovered System Restore was off and wouldn't switch on.

 

The man from Dell managed to get System restore to start, not sure how and left me to it.

 

Uninstalled McAfee, installed MSE

Installed JRE and Flash

Installed Microsoft Office

Installed chrome

 

Back to square one.. no wifi, nothing will start except Task Manager

 

Force shutdown. Booted in safe mode

System restore to before Chrome

reboots.

Log into user and get black screen with arrow cursor... NOT A BSOD and there it hangs.

 

Any ideas?

 

There's no data on this machine, i haven't got that far

[FN-GM]

Personally do a nice clean install with no dell rubbish on.

 

Really sorry to hijack but i am looking at getting one of these. Physically what do you think of it?

[elsiegee40]

Personally do a nice clean install with no dell rubbish on.

 

Really sorry to hijack but i am looking at getting one of these. Physically what do you think of it?

If I ever get it to work, I'll let you know.

 

I don't have any disks to do a clean install and with it being so new don't want to screw things up in case I have to send it back. This is starting to feel like a hardware fault as I haven't done anything install wise to cause trouble, but what?

[DrPerceptron]

Did you try installing the software one at a time, restarting after each to see if the problem exists because of one piece of software being weird?

 

When you have the black screen, in task manager is userinit.exe and explorer.exe started?

[Dos_Box]

Is it an SSD model?

[elsiegee40]

each piece of software installed one at a time. Reboot. Restore point taken.

 

Did it in a different order second time.

 

First time failure was with iTunes and Chrome already installed and happened after Office was installed

Second time failure was with Office installed (no iTunes) and happened after Chrome.

 

 

----

 

"When you have the black screen, in task manager is userinit.exe and explorer.exe started?"

Don't know it isn't doing anything and can't get into Task Manager

 

--------

 

"Is it an SSD model?"

 

Yes... is this significant?

Edited September 23, 2013 by elsiegee40

[elsiegee40]

Progress... after 30 minutes it has sprung into life.

 

There are a whole string of ISCT Agent errors and warnings in the logs whatever that means... trying to understand google .

Not sure if this is because the laptop was fighting this or other things caused the ISCT agent problem

 

So no progress at all really

Edited September 23, 2013 by elsiegee40

[mac_shinobi]

Option 1

 

Call Dell Tech Support who deals with laptops and see what they advise

 

Option 2

 

Use an imaging tool that can make a bit image of whats on the laptop after freshly restoring the laptop ( so clone zilla / fog or whatever tool you want to use ) and then image it using your own schools windows 7 image / drivers and see if it does the same when you try and install all those applications etc etc

 

Option 3

 

Run dell diagnostics on the laptop to ensure hard drive, ram, cpu etc etc are all good ( dell diagnostics cd unless it has the dell diagnostics partition installed or if you get the diagnostics bootable option when you or after you press the F12 option )

[Arthur]

I don't have any discs to do a clean install

Download the relevant disc from here, reinstall Windows from scratch and where possible download the latest drivers from the component manufacturers websites. e.g. Intel for chipset and graphics drivers. etc.

[elsiegee40]

OK. Between Mr Dell of India, his brothers and I, we seem to have cracked it finally. ISCT was causing no end of problems. It has been uninstalled and we have one happy laptop, or so it seems. Mr Dell has done a number of other tweaks, I wasn't watching properly so I can't say what exactly, and at the moment it is flying... so fast

 

I have been fighting this for 10 hours straight today... first call to Dell was at 8am... so it's time for a G&T and I'll sort the rest out after work tomorrow.

Edited September 23, 2013 by elsiegee40

[mac_shinobi]

OK. Between Mr Dell of India, his brothers and I, we seem to have cracked it finally. ISCT was causing no end of problems. It has been uninstalled and we have one happy laptop, or so it seems. Mr Dell has done a number of other tweaks, I wasn't watching properly so I can't say what exactly, and at the moment it is flying... so fast

 

I have been fighting this for 10 hours straight today... first call to Dell was at 8am... so it's time for a G&T and I'll sort the rest out after work tomorrow.

 

Thanks for the feedback !!

[jmak]

Personally do a nice clean install with no dell rubbish on.

 

Really sorry to hijack but i am looking at getting one of these. Physically what do you think of it?

@Elsiegee - glad you got it working

@FN-GM

 

I bought one of the XPS 14s and the build quality seems excellent - all metal and glass, so it's no feather weight. Gorilla glass screen is good but very shiny. Could do with more ports - 2 USBs just aren't enough. Runs nice and fast most of the time and as it's the first machine I've had with a (hybrid) SSD, seems very quick to boot. One of the nice things was that there was virtually no bloat ware - more or less vanilla install. Think I'm going to put a clean install on it anyway - the HDD is constantly chuntering away even though task manager says not much is happening.

[elsiegee40]

@FN-GM agree with @jmak on everything. There is virtually no bloatware on the XPS and I was relieved to find that I can still get from off to desktop very quickly this morning. Boot was fine yesterday, it was login to desktop that wasn't happening.

 

There are only 2 USB ports and no ethernet port, so you need reliable wifi with it. I have bought a powered USB hub to use on the odd occasion when I need more ports. I also have a USB-ethernet converter just in case.

 

I have no real complaints with Dell tech support either regarding their handling of this. It took forever to find the problem, but it is hard when the machine is so unresponsive and a factory reset with their original image didn't fix it. Watch out for ISCT!

[hawc]

At least it arrived in one piece

[FN-GM]

Thanks for the reviews @elsiegee40 and @jmak - My current MacBook pro has only 2 USB ports and hasn't been a problem yet so that should be ok. The HP netbooks do have an Ethernet port that folds out some how. Not sure if i can bring myself to spend more money so soon after getting a new car!

 

Thanks again.

[jmak]

14" does have an Ethernet port

[john]

How is the trackpad especially the buttons on yours? A colleague has one and its incredibly irritating the click isn't always reliable and it doesn't always seem to respond

[elsiegee40]

The trackpad isn't as good as the old laptop we had, but hasn't driven me nuts. I'm not very good with a trackpad anyway and tend to revert to a mouse, but haven't done so at the moment.

[john]

The trackpad isn't as good as the old laptop we had, but hasn't driven me nuts. I'm not very good with a trackpad anyway and tend to revert to a mouse, but haven't done so at the moment.

 

Thanks for the feedback