SP-2 update destroys HD
From: Jeff (jeff_at_phony.com)
Date: 11/05/04
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 14:22:42 -0500
I think this piece of info needs to be made known to whoever it may concern.
It might help others with the same problem. Here is the sad story and the
response from Dell.
It concerns my daughter's Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop which she uses at law
school. After she automatic Windows Update updated her XP Home, she started
to notice all sorts of problems including abrupt crashes. I looked for
spyware, viruses, etc and found nothing because she was well protected with
Zone Alarm and numerous uptodate utilities. Then finally, while in the midst
of a paper she had been working on for a week, the laptop crashed and would
not reboot because the HD had died and would not boot up. Using some tricks
I got the HD to boot up for a few minutes - enough to save her data - before
the HD died completely with grinding noises. Because of the urgency of her
law school work I was obliged to purchase a new laptop from a store while I
tried to fix her Dell Laptop.
I purchased a new HD, installed it and installed XP Home from the recovery
CD, installed the Dell drivers and decided to install SP-2 which went
through smoothly. After I installed SP-2 I noticed the laptop fans were not
coming on as usual. Concerned, I installed several utilities to monitor the
HD temperature. They all showed the same thing: the temp went up to 60 C
after about 15 minutes, at which point I would shut down to laptop to avoid
further damage. The fans did n not go on. Using the tests provided on the
Dell Utility CD I found that both the motherboard and processor fans were
working fine and would go on at both speeds when so instructed by the test
utilities. Even more significant, when booting from the utility CD (not
XP), the fans would spontaneously go on repeatedly while running other
tests - not the fan tests which would start them. However when I booted
into XP SP-2, the fans would not go on even when the HD temp went beyond
critical.
The above is just a summary of what I went through trying to figure out what
happened to the laptop. It is only after a lot of detective work that,
knowing that it is the BIOS that has a lot to do with the fans coming on to
prevent excessive heat, I finally came to the conclusion that the SP-2
update was somehow incompatible with the original BIOS thus preventing the
fans from coming on when they needed to. I emailed Dell and here is their
response, which confirms what I thought:
..........................
Dear Jeff,
Thank you for providing the feedback.
Jeff, I think we have figured the problem. In this case the
culprit might be SP2. as currently there are lot of compatibility issues
with it and it is common if after installing XP SP2, some devices stop
working. In this case before going to Dell sales and purchasing a
replacement fan, I will suggest you to uninstall XP SP2 and look for the
issue. Refer to the link mentioned below which will assist you in
uninstalling XP SP2:
To update the BIOS refer to the link mentioned below:
For updating the Video Drivers, refer to the link mentioned below:
The link mentioned above has a file ?NX2K4482.EXE?. Please download and
save the file on the desktop. Once the download is complete, please
double click on the downloaded file and refer to the on screen
instructions.
If you need any further assistance, please feel free to email me.
Respectfully,
-- Jeff Williams Email address deliberately false to avoid spam jeff@phony.com
- Next message: Ron Martell: "Re: out of range. answer to neil"
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