On 12/29/2010 10:17 PM, Ben Myers wrote:
On 12/29/2010 7:24 PM, Christopher Muto wrote:
On 12/29/2010 1:20 PM, Ben Myers wrote:
A regular client brought me an XPS M1530 laptop with symptoms of hard
drive failure. The system is under Dell's Complete Care warranty, so it
is entitled to a hard drive replacement.

People with warranties on computers contact me regularly because they do
not want to spend the hour I spent today to get them to send me a
replacement hard drive, but DO NOT schedule a Dell service tech please!

Rahul was misinformed that pressing Fn together with the Power On button
activates firmware diagnostics. I don't think so. They appear to be the
same ones from the diagnostic partition. He was also unable to answer
the question of what to do if the diagnostic partition is hosed. He
thought that there were firmware diagnostics. I did not know about the
Fn-Powerswitch key combination. Is this something found only in newer
Dell laptops, and if so, beginning when.

I also ran Western Digital's hard drive diagnostic, which told me that
117 sectors had been repaired, and it did not even attempt to run any
more tests. Perhaps the system took a hit or a bump or a jolt after two
years?

I wonder where Rahul and Mohammed are? Pakistan? Afghanistan?

An interesting hour, to say the least... Ben Myers

fwiw, holding down fn and pressing the power key starts something called
"psa" diagnostics on the xps mxxxx series. i suspect what their problem
resolution script was taking them on a path to test the video which is
done by pressing 'n' after the above is done. this is done because of
the unfortunate common video failure in these models that could be the
reason for the callers 'no boot' complaint.


Darn ignorant script monkeys. Rahul knew darn well that the problem was
not video from all the info I provided to him. And he was clueless in
stating that the BIOS had hard drive diagnostics built-in. If there were
any after pressing Fn-PowerOn, they were moot... Ben

they don't get paid to think.
video failure, which results in a motherboard replacement 'kit' (that
includes a new heat sink/fan/thermal pads) is far more common in this
model than hard drive failure. on a positive note, dell seems to ship
replacement drives for the xps mxxxx series with the os already loaded.
but the os is probably vista and replacing it with windows 7 makes for
a much better user experience (vista seems to randomly hand on these
machines for unknown reasons).