The worst luck…
I swear I have the worst luck ever…
As mentioned in an earlier post. My mother-in-law got a new computer thereby passing her old Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop down to me. I was so excited to get my hands on this thing. I just love messing around with new gadgets. Now the computer worked fine when it was handed over to me…fine that is when you consider all the usual glitches etc… associated with a Windows machine that you just decide to live with (Yes that’s a jab from a Mac fan). So being new to me I had no plan on living with the little bugs that drive me crazy.
I’ve wanted to try Linux for a while now so was looking forward to the opportunity. I swear I must have tried every livecd distro out ther, but I couldn’t get anything to work with video card (Nvidia Geforce Go5200). To me that’s pretty lame… I think I’m giving up on my Linux pipe dream.
So giving up on Linux I just reformatted with Windows XP. It took me a whole day I swear, manually installing all the dell drivers (I didn’t have the Dell Recovery Disk). Then it took several hours to install all the windows upates. I went to bed and the computer was a clean, mean, machine.
Yesterday…got a call from my son. The computer stopped working. Stuck on the boot screen, keeps cycling through the boot screen no matter what you do. I thought I could fix it when I got home…but no luck. I can’t get the thing to do anything. Not even boot from a CD…any CD I tried. Something is screwed up. I feel terrible because this was going to be my sons laptop and now it’s bricked. I’m also really mad at myself because anyway you cut it… I bricked it. (Though I swear I did everything right and it’s not my fault).
So I’m pretty mad today.
My wife’s going to take it to a local computer store and see if they’ll look at. I don’t want to spend much money on it. Looking on Ebay and Craiglist they’re going for about $200-300. I’m thinking something went out…video card, motherboard, CD/DVD drive. Probably not worth replacing.
What really makes me mad is that after giving up on Ubuntu I came across another idea yesterday that I was extremely excited about trying. Can you say Hackintosh???
Check out this site…pretty interesting.
I’ve just decided that the Tech God’s hate me… But I don’t know why I’ve sacrificed enough blood, sweat and money to them. You think they’d show me a little love.
Maybe there just jealous that I have an iphone and they don’t. I don’t know. But I give up… For now.
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Just found your blog and wanted to offer any help I could in getting your 8600 working. I am a customer advocate here at Dell headquarters in Texas. Most of my background here at Dell is working notebook support so I’m pretty familiar with the 8600.
If you haven’t already tried it, I’d recommend reseating the CD and hard drives just to make sure they have solid connections. The instructions for removing them are available in the service manual for the system. Basically, just take the drives out then put them back in, making sure they are firmly seated.
If that doesn’t work, go into the BIOS (F2 at the Dell splash screen just after powering on the computer) to make sure the boot device settings are correct. Once in the BIOS press ALT+P to change to page 2, which has the boot devices and the order they are checked. Use the arrow keys to move up and down the list, the space bar to toggle individual devices on and off (the triangle pointing right means it is “on”), and the letters U and D to move devices up and down the list. When the computer starts up, it starts at the top of the list and tries to boot from the first device it finds that is bootable.
The full list of drivers (just in case you ever need to reinstall again) are:
* Dell Notebook System Software
* Intel Mobile Chipset driver
* nVidia GeForceMX 5200 video driver
* SigmaTel STAC 9750 audio driver
* Broadcom Integrated Network Controller driver
* Modem Daughter Card (MDC) driver
* Wireless MiniPCI driver (if you have a wireless network card)
* Wireless Bluetooth (if you have one)
* Alps touchpad drivers
The Notebook System Software is the Dell addition to the Intel Chipset Software, and is required for all of the hardware to work correctly.
If you have any questions about the system, or if my suggestions don’t help fix the problem, please let me know.
Larry
Dell Customer Advocate
WoW!!! I’m impressed by the unsolicited customer service. Thanks for caring. Makes me wonder though…do Dell Customer Advocates surf blogs, etc… looking for things like this??? If so, that’s cool….very proactive.
I actually got the computer fixed. It was a bad CD/DVD drive. It was going out before I got the computer handed down.
The computer works great now. I’m typing from it right now…not in Windows though. I’m running OS X on it… see my Hackintosh post for more info.
I’m glad to hear it was something that simple, and that you already have it taken care of. If you have other questions about the system I’ll be happy to answer them for you. I don’t know much at all about OS X, but I know the hardware in that system pretty well from my time working “front line” tech support.
The purpose of my team is to go out on the internet and try to contact people that have posted about problems with Dell (such as yourself). I have to say it is the most interesting tech support/customer service position I have ever worked.
Larry
Dell Customer Advocate