XPS 1330 will not turn on

A very strange problem - I do hope someone can help.

I have a new (7 weeks!) XPS 1330 which has turned poorly.

The machine (if this helps) has 2GB RAM/250GB HD.

It was in use on battery last night for 20 mins or so after being fully charged. Closed the case and put it to sleep, come to power up this morning and nothing. Pressing the power button illuminates the front bezel power LED for about two seconds and then nothing.

The Battery power indicator was showing 4/5 LED lit on the small pushbutton tester.


Things I've tried..

• Removed the HDD
• Tried to boot it with No HDD
• Removed and reseated the RAM
• Holding the power button down
• Starting it up on AC power only.
• Holding the power button in for 30 seconds or so and the front power LED Cycles every 5 seconds or so

So now, it's 'bricked'.

I suspect either a hardware problem or an OS issue that's stopping it form resuming from it's last shutdown state.

Couple of questions...

Is there any way to force VISTA to do a 'cold boot' and ignore the prior sleep state?

Is there any way to force the XPS to do a 'hard-reset'?

Is there anything else I might consider?

 

The two second LED light is telling you something. You need to call Dell and find out.

This is not a Vista problem. Your BIOS are detecting that something is broken and will not work, and prevents the laptop from booting up.

Chances are that Dell will have to replace something to get your notebook to work again.

 

Hey Belle, any joy with this? I've had the same problem with my refurbed 1330 I got from the outlet a few weeks ago. Support have been very helpful, and have sent me a list of things to try, to isolate the offending hardware. I'm an IT engineer so I kinda know what to do when it comes to removing hdd and RAM sticks. One thing they suggested, which hasn't given me a definitive answer, is to hold down the Fn key when pressing the power button. This forces the machine to boot into a diagnostic mode. From here you can run various hardware tests. I havent had any failures listed in these tests yet, but one advantage is that when ever my machine wont power on, I just use this Fn key method to load into the diagnostic mode, then a quick ctrl-alt-del will get me restarted into a fully working normal mode. Gets you out of a hole until the offending piece of hardware is found.

Hope this helps you in the meantime

Good luck!

 

Plug in your adapter without the battery only, keeping everything intact.

You try turning on your computer. If you see a flashing LED indicator from the laptop and it then shuts down, that means its a hardware problem.

Check/Remove and reseat every single hardware component you upgraded in your system, then try again.

If you stick in the battery, the stick in the AC Adapter, does the LED indicator come on? If not, then it most likely is a battery problem in which its not charging.

Since your LED indicator is flashing, its definitely a hardware issue. Do what I said at the very top, and if that still doesn't work, most likely your motherboard is faulty.

 

I'm having the same issue with a m1710. I know for a fact the battery is completely dead, but it won't start with the battery out and the ac adapter plugged in. I just replaced the motherboard and it still won't turn on. Let me know if you figure anything out

 

You might also want to refer to this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=282244

Though it is a different model, there are some things you can try out in there that will hopefully be of use to you.

 

might be something about the nvidia card.

My dad had the same problem, it would not turn on.

they sent a technician and he replaced the mobo (said that the card had a problem)

And after it worked properly.

 

Bit of an update.

The "not-turning-on" behaviour persisted for an hour or so and then... up it came.

I flashed the A12 BIOS as soon as I could (the machines shipped with A11 - I checked my pourchase date - it's only amonth old).

No repeat of the incident since the problem on Monday.

I've subsequently run the internal diagnostics accessed via the "Fn" key at boot time and that's all come up clean. Nothing in the event logs on the system tell of anything either.

Curious.

 

That's exactly the same issue as me - Spent most of yesterday going back and forward to the laptop, running the disgnostic tests, all come back ok. I've reseated the HDD and RAM, hasn't happened since, but has been intermittent, so only time will tell if it's truely cured.

Lovely laptop though - very very happy with it!

 

After three subsequent weeks of faultless running.. a further recurrence.

Identical behaviour in the XPS machine, this time I've narrowed down the behaviour...

• It has only ever happened by just closing the case and leaving the machine. I'm convinced it's a function of the sleep/hibernate state that the system gets itself into.
• Holding down Fn-Power takes it on a little further (not something I'd tried previously). This time the Numlock, Capslock, Scroll-lock and Bluetooth LEDs all come on, the disk spins up briefly and then... SPROING... and a spin-down of the disk as it has the power cut.

.. and the remedy... wait 35 mins, try again.. Resumes like perfect.

 

I'm not sure if this is a related problem, but I believe it might be at this point. I have a brand new M1330 as well. It's running the A12 bios, and Vista SP1 factory install. This issue seems to be related to waking up after sleep, specifically. If I leave the laptop, plugged in, overnight, it will sleep. When I press the power button, it wakes up fine, asks for a password. I log in and then it gives me the windows spinning ring thing, then a black screen hang.

I've had Dell techs try to fix this twice already, including reinstalling from the recovery partition. Still has the problem. The first tech had me turn off the 'allow windows to turn off this adapter' powersave option on the ethernet adapters (copper and wifi) because he saw a complaint about BCM42RLY in the system log. But that didn't seem to help.

From the black screen, I can't do anything but powerdown by holding the power button for 10 seconds. On the next boot, it detects that windows did not start properly and give me the 'safe mode' options. I pick start windows normally and everything works fine.

I'm tempted to blast vista altogether and try to get an ubuntu OS from dell, since they'll ship these m1330's with ubuntu now.

Anyone else having this 'waking up' issue?

One thing I haven't tried is getting a newer broadcom (ethernet) driver (if there is one) from broadcom.... just thinking about that now.

 

I've read about a similar sleep issue on MacBook Pros recently. It usually led to motherboard replacements.

 

It's under warranty still. Sat on the phone and ran through all the HW tests with the tech... Everything passed, but he still thinks its probably an ethernet adapter issue. MB, Ram, CPU are on the way and they're gonna replace the whole enchilada.

By the way... to save some time for someone else... they had me:

Power up while holding the Fn key. This runs some BIOS-based diagnostics.

Those all passed, but then from there you can boot into the Diagnostic partition and run the 'Express test', which took about an hour. Those all passed for me too. (you can also boot the 'Drivers' disk to run those diagnostics)

Basically, they weren't gonna send any tech out until I had 1) re-imaged the hard drive to factory image, and 2) run both of those diagnostics.

But it's done now, and theoretically, I should have a tech at my door on Wednesday (1 day to ship parts, 1 day to dispatch)

Not sure in the end if this is the same issue as bellebouche, but I'll let you know how it turns out.