Returning my Studio XPS 1340

Like others, I've been experiencing intermittent lockups on my Studio XPS 13. They occur completely at random, and can't be reproduced; they don't seem to coincide with any particular kind of activity or symptom such as high load, heavy disk access or heat. It's always an abrupt freeze of the kind you get when your CPU or graphics card craps out. The BIOS still responds to fn-key combos and the media keys, but the computer has to be hard rebooted.

This is combined with the fact that the computer will occasionally refuse to boot at all. It does the little dancing lights routine but doesn't get to POST; the LCD backlight doesn't even come on.

I've tried restoring from the Dell factory image, doing a clean install of Vista, new video card drivers, new BIOS, etc. I talked to customer support and they said they'll send out a new hard drive, but I don't think that's the problem. I've seen hard drives fail and it doesn't usually look like this. It doesn't help that the estimated delivery date for the replacement hard drive is March 16 (!).

From what I've read, I'm hardly the only one having exactly these problems, so obviously these machines share some kind of common flaw or ( very) failure-prone component.

I'm sending it back for the refund. It's a shame, since the Studio XPS is a great design, save for the screen occluding the one exhaust vent--if they did a minor revision that fixed that problem, I'd have no qualms about ordering another one. But until they get their hardware bugs ironed out, I'll have to hold off.

Here's the pertinent specs, just in case anyone is having similar problems and might be able to narrow it down:

Studio XPS 13
P8400 (2.26GHz)
4GB DDR3 1067MHz
WLED screen
GeForce 9500M
320GB 7200RPM hard drive
Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

 

im sorry for this. I hope you get better luck with your next purchase.

 

sorry to hear, ordered mines last week...hope it does not have the same problems