Thursday 17 May 2007

The Dell Dimension 9200 & Vista (aka The Good, The Bad & The Ugly)

A while ago, a friend asked me who they should buy their new PC from - I've for a long time been a fan of Dell for their price/performance/build quality balance and so without hesitation I recommended the latest incarnation of the Dimension 9200.

Hats off to Dell for being able to build a nice Intel box with 2GB RAM, 500GB SATA (2x250GB RAID) and a 22" widescreen monitor, bundled with Vista ultimate this came to only around £800.

As to Vista - I began to get nervous when during the installation the machine flashed up a 'there is no disk in the drive message', this was resolved quickly. Following this, I experienced a very slick interface which took a huge (read monumental) amount of time to boot up.

My experiences over the subsequent couple of days indicated a number of issues that probably should have not have passed quality control (such as the strange way in which you need to import old Outlook Express 6 messages to Windows mail.)

I started to remove the rubbish pre-installed with the PC (time limited versions of Corel products, Tiscali/Orange internet etc) but after about 10 minutes the system completely locked up, I was about to perform a physical restart (power switch) when the system returned to normal.

After this was experienced a couple of times, we restarted - the problem persisted. A quick search on google revealed that this is in fact a much reported problem, by Dell users all over the world.

After a few hours of reading through other peoples experiences I managed to find the answer - it would appear that the Dell PC in question is shipped with a Phillips SATA DVD-ROM drive and that the drive has some kind of fault that periodically (every 10-15 mins) results in it locking up windows (for about 20-30 seconds each time).

There is a patch to resolve this on the Dell website but its only listed as an urgent flash bios update for the Phillips DVD-Rom drive, its not listed as a critical patch nor is the symptom highlighted.

I can verify that the problem has now completely vanished.

I like Vista and I think the new Dell 9200 is a fantastic machine but someone really needs to get a handle on quality control as the box should have never left the bench with this error.

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