Studio 17 Issues

My wife just got a brand new Dell Studio 17 a few weeks back and she's noticed two somewhat annoying issues, just wondering if anyone has come across some help for this.

The first is that the volume up/down buttons don't work well when pressed. Sometimes it takes quite a lot of pressing, sliding, etc to get it to recognize you're touching either one of those buttons. The eject and other media buttons work fine, even the mute..its just the volume up and down.

The other issue is that it seems to spit dvd/cd's back at her quite frequently. She'll pop them in and they'll just spit right out, this happens over and over until finally it takes it.

Any info on these issues would be great...thanks!

 

Have you tried holding down the volume instead of pressing it? When I first got mine I would tap it and it took a while to go where I want. Now I just hold down and it seems to work better.

Not sure about the optical drive. If you can post the model number we can probably help you find the driver for it.

 

I've tried keeping it pressed and even then it doesn't seem to register. I'll try and get the model number when my wife comes in. Thanks

 

PP31L is the model number...thanks

 

That's the Studio 17 model number. You can find the optical drive model through the Device Manager in Windows.

 

The drive issue is curious...I thought I was having an issue but I kept touching the eject button on accident, but it seems that this isn't the case with you. It's probably a physical issue that could be fixed with a new drive.

As for the volume button issue, go to control panel -> sound and double click on the currently selected output device. In the new window click the "Levels" tab. On that page you will see a volume slider. Try pressing the up and down volume buttons and see if the slider moves, even if it's just a little. For whatever reason dell decided that we wanted 1% steps when we press the button, so the volume doesn't adjust very fast when you press it. However, if the slider doesn't move at all, that means there is an issue either with the buttons or the driver. You could reinstall the driver (uninstall the current media button driver, restart, download a new copy from support.dell.com, install and reboot) and see if that makes a difference. Otherwise, it would seem to be a hardware issue (unlikely, but we can't rule it out).

Try that and let us know what happens. Good luck.

-Dan

 

I'll have to give this all a try when I get home. Thanks for the tips!

 

Anytime

 

Still no luck with the volume, it seems to specifically be the volume up button.

The model number for the DVD drive is:
TSSTcorp DVD+RW TS-T633A