Windows 10: Windows 10 killed my dell xps 2710

Do you mean you only have the integrated Intel graphics rather than the dual Intel/nvidia set up?
i have the dual but the issue is that the display used the integrated card as primary in all cases as its physically connected into it. I wonder if you don't have the dual set up if this issue is effecting the Intel 4000 chip predominantly...
Whatever the issue is, I totally agree it needs looking at by dell to be able to tell msft to roadblock the offending driver.. Tbh at this price point they should be fixing it or recalling them

 

I don't have the nvidia graphics drivers. It listed in the device manager as Intel(R) HD Graphics.

 

Interesting, not sure we will ever get a fix specific to us though, tbh I'm happy enough with 8.1 but the amount of hassle to get back to a functioning machine was probably way beyond the average user which makes it a serious problem but also a decent revenue stream for dell

 

Hope this is useful to someone out there as my XPS one was toasted by Windows 10 and black screen booted like others on here, and it didn't happen straight away, used win10 for a few weeks before it happened.

The XPS one wasn't my main computer so I had time and patience to look at this carefully. Often read this forum. What intrigued me most was this seemingly random startup nature of the pc... It was like if you press a random series of buttons then occasionally occasionally you might just get it to boot. But it never lasted long. Sound familiar?

In actual fact there was just as much work in figuring out the black screen startup as there was restoring the pc after, but since the black screen bit is puzzling bit I'm going to focus on that for now.

I'm a scientist, and the idea of a computer behaving seemingly randomly gave me the shivers. So I decided to run experiments on it and see what I found. I won't bore you with the details, but eventually I found there is a much higher incidence of a successful boot the FIRST time you try after the computer being off for some time (1-2hrs). Imagine it like the computer gets hot after its been on awhile but if you turn it on cold it has a higher chance of booting. Atleast mine did. Finally at the end of the experiment I was able to boot my pc the first time I tried for 4 days straight. The pattern was confirmed.

That was the end of the part 1 because from here I could use traditional pc repair methods to solve the problem...Although this too turned out stranger and harder than I imagined. If you are interested in what happened next let me know and Ill give you the steps I had to go through to finally have my CPS back up and running again.

Cheers

BHend

 

Whoa! My son has the XPS 2710 model with the Haswell i7 and the Intel 4600 graphics chip. It upgraded to Windows 10 with no difficulties at all, still runs like a top 8 months afterward. I did upgrade it to a bigger mSATA drive from whence it now boots, and upgraded it to 16 GB RAM. Also, because of the media switch, I did a clean Windows 10 install not an upgrade install, and wonder if that might have made a difference. Didn't realize we'd dodged such a savage bullet. Love to know more about what bhend02 did to accomplish repairs after the ability to boot was confirmed and exploited.
Cheers!
--Ed--

 

@bhend02


If it is what I think it is. Dell made a mistake and didn't offer speed control for the fan. I understood why they did because you could set it to low and ruin your motherboard. Sometimes you need the fan to be at higher speed. You might want to consider replacing your fan, it could be bad.


bhend02. You might want to consider making a tutorial. I am not sure how to submit a tutorial, @Brink can tell you.

 

The funny thing is that electronic devices and computers in particular are made with tons of components which have tolerances of +/- 5% or 10%, and so are working on a statistical probability of getting any process to run as designed, or else, fail.

When there was a clutch of different grades of Genuine Intel 486 processors available, it became known that the very best specification processors, and the worst and lowest spec processors came off the identical same assembly line, with the same chip as manufactured, but each individual package was tested and graded and then the package was finished and labelled and sold with the specifications that the finished chip was capable of, and the reason for the variation of what should have been a highly controlled standardized item, was simply due to inevitable manufacturing defects impossible to predict or prevent at the very small scale that the chips were fabricated.

So there again, the CPU works on a statistical probability that it will behave in all features advertised as well as expected, and maybe better, as the practice of overclocking bears witness to.

All in all, computers are nearer to organic systems than engineered ones. Imagine if you had the very rare "Mary Poppins" of Processors - "Practically Perfect in every way"!

It would be fascinating, and possibly highly instructive to hear the steps you had to go through to achieve the resurrection of this beast.

I too have an XPS system that flickers on the edge of booting (not toasted by Windows 10, I think), a M1730, and I'd love to breathe it back to life.

 

I just installed Windows 10 on my brother-in-law's XPS M1530 this weekend. He has 4 GB in it, and it runs much better than I expected.

 

Hi,

Sorry to say so but the crux of the problem seems bios related to me.


Cheers, *Wink

 

Thankyou for this explanation Fafhrd. Very informative, I didn't know the half of what you have explained and it is very enlightening! Not sure how to do a tutorial yet, but in the mean time, see below:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note1: This is not a flawless set of instructions. More a list of the steps that I took
(including the failed ones) to get to a point of success without opening the box.
Hopefully it helps someone or at least saves someone a little time...

Note2: I've skipped how I dealt with backups for the sake of brevity,
but obviously please backup anything important prior to this. If you can't get into windows
you can boot into your windows setup (or bootable USB) and goto the command prompt and use XCOPY
or such to copy documents to a USB (for example).

Step 0: Leave your computer off for 1-2 hours, to increase its likelihood of POST'ng, and being able to enter BIOS see earlier msg for more.

This section(1) turned out to be a waste of time(possibly with the exception of the asterisked step 1.4)
but is still useful for learning from:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Attempt 1 - Unsuccessful after several tries
1.1 Boot into Bios (F2/F12 on boot)
1.2 Changed boot order, put USB first (because I had handy a bootable windows USB, but would have used ODD if wanted to used the CD)
1.3 DELL rescue bootable USB drive->Windows setup->Command prompt
1.4* Updated Bios from A11 to A12 (download from Dell website)
1.5 Formatted main hard drive
1.6 Reinstalled Windows 8.1 to main 1TB drive (< in hindsight I wouldn't do this step now)
1.7 Installed hundreds of windows updates over two days
1.8 -> Now intermittently get "No bootable device" errors. When it did successfully boot, it
freezes up every few seconds, basically still unsatisfactory and unstable. Looking back I'd skip
this section (attempt 1) and go with what worked (below), and save myself some headaches.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Attempt 2 - Success without opening the box
Note: This is what eventually worked in my case but this is only one path to success, not discounting there may be
other better ways or ways more suitable to your scenario specifically. Also this fundamentally changes the
underlying setup of the computer compared to its native setup, but it is working very well with no noticeable
degradation in performance (although I havent tried gaming on it).

2.1 Boot into BIOS (F2/F12 on boot)
2.2 Changed boot mode from UEFI to legacy
2.3 Changed boot order for bootable USB (or ODD if you want to use windows DVD)
2.4 Changed SATA mode to 'ACHI' and reboot into windows setup (put in USB/DVD before rebooting)
2.5 Deleted old windows partition (eradicate Win10).
2.6 Installed Windows 8.1 on the in-built 32GB Cache SSD. Use the public default windows product code for 8.1:
[334NH-RXG76-64THK-C7CKG-D3VPT]
(Remove boot disk before reboot, finish windows setup)
2.7 Once in windows proper, connect internet, download the OEMProductKey tool to get your original activation code, activate and reboot (windows update didn't work properly using the default key (or prior to activation))
2.8 Installed windows updates, antivirus, favorite browser
2.9 Turned off hibernation, and remove hiberfil.sys (saved 7GB), Now has 9(/32GB) free
2.10 Put in a 64GB SanDisk(SDXC) into the card drive on the LHS side (microsd not directly compatible without card reader)
2.11 Change location of documents, pictures, music, etc. to the SD drive (RMB on folder->Properties->Location)
2.12 Installed GWX control panel and used to suppress Win10 nagware
2.13 -> Has been running very smoothly for several days now (in 8.1)

I intended to use the original 1TB drive for backup and storage but have since noticed it appeared
and disappeared intermittently (relates to 1.8 above?). Finally it stopped working altogether.

In hindsight if I had persisted with trying to re-install windows on the main drive it would probably never
have worked as it looks like it has somehow died. This may have been directly caused by the original Win10
issue or it may have somehow been caused by the numerous times I had to hard reboot (and punch) it.

The way it is setup now is quite different to its native setup (originally booting using UEFI with
RAID mode using the SSD for caching). But it does run very smoothly with the OS on the SSD and I'm very happy
with its performance now. This method loses the benefit of INTELs Rapid Storage Technology (RST) but could be
reconfigured if deciding to another replacement HDD. Note you'd have to change back the BIOS UEFI&RAID settings
first to attempt this.

Hope this helps someone,

BHend

 

My Dell 2710 died as well. I was told by a technician that Windows 10 was responsible. I was able to have the system board repaired, but the technician explained that I could not use my original HDD with Win10. I needed to go back to 8.1 or suffer the same fate.

Up until now, I had assumed that the software could not damage my hardware. I was wrong, but I am still left wondering how is this happened? By the way, the manufacturer was unable to help and did not have replacement ($$$$) system boards available.

 

I would find a new technician to work on your computer. I don't know what killed your Dell but I seriously doubt that it was Windows 10.

 

No, you were correct. Windows 10 is not damaging hardware. Simple as that.

 

It's most certainly 10. I can't prove this but after buying two units and replacing the bios chips they work fine. I even went as far as installing the old bios chip just to make sure it was indeed the issue. Both of these machines went belly up after being forced through windows update to windows 10. I can't go as far as saying this will remedy every single dead 2710 but its worth the $22 risk and soldering the replacement chip onto the board isn't very difficult. Only downfall to this fix is you will lose the product key embedded into the bios and you won't have a service tag. Give it a try and see for yourself, this just may fix that expensive paperweight.

 

The very first thing you want to do after the machine is back up and running and this is critical in my own opinion is go directly to into bios by hitting f2 and change the boot order to odd first so that you can boot from the system restore DVD and install Win 8.1 back on the machine. I'm going to extract the BIOS beforehand and flash it back onto the original SPI with my SPI programmer so that I have a backup and then install the latest build of 10. I'm curious to see if maybe it was a bug in that specific build or if it was an issue with rev. A09 BIOS. I'm all but certain for some odd reason Win 10 somehow gets into to UEFI and either changes something or scrambles the data rendering the machine non-functional.