I bought my XPS 420 back in December '07. I remember getting a blue screen soon after but no problems were present and it worked fine. However, I think some things were messed up so I did a Dell factory restore and things were fine aftewards.
Fast forward to last week, when I decided to do a Dell factory restore again because the Live! Cam Avatar software that came with my new Dell SP2208WFP monitor wasn't running. I thought maybe something was corrupt with Windows, causing that program to not load properly. However, after doing the first restore, I started getting blue screens again. It would happen probably 1 out of 3 or 4 reboots. The codes were:
0x4c
0x2
0x1
0x8... (it's a long one that I'll fill in when I get access to the piece of paper I wrote them on)
The blue screen states the "IRQL does not equal" message.
After recovering from the blue screens, I noticed that many things in Windows were messed up. Some of those things that come to mind are:
- XPS MiniView Dell gadgets were missing OR were not functioning properly. If they show up, I would get an "unable to connect" type of error.
- XPS MiniView in Device Manager had an exclamation mark.
- USB HF-SC (or some combination of those letters) in Device Manager had an exclamation mark.
- Network icon in the task bar shows disconnected and any attempt at opening network configurations results in the network window opening up blank and freezing.
- Items in System in the Control Panel are missing, showing "not available." More notable items are the Windows Vista rating (the "x.x" number that shows compatibility, mine was 5.5).
- Items in Dell Support Center regarding my system were also missing, such as service tag and warranty expiration.
- iTunes shows my music but when I try to play them, nothing plays and the progress slider that shows the progress in the song doesn't move.
I've done the Dell factory restore AT LEAST TEN TIMES IN THE PAST THREE DAYS and the same thing ends up happening.
One thing I also noticed is that one of the times, the blue screen apparently happened while doing the Windows update (it happened while I was away from the computer, same codes were kicked back). Lumanate Lazer USB (I think that's the Dell Xcelerator) update failed and I had to roll back the driver in the control panel. I think I had a problem with that out of the factory, causing me to do my very first system restore back in December.
I called XPS support and was on the phone with them for about 3 hours and nothing came of it (he was trying to fix the devices in the Device Manager even though that was not the underlying problem...). I don't know if my restore partition got corrupted. I did the extended 32-bit diagnostics and the only error I got was in one of the mouse tests where I couldn't click on the squares because the mouse wasn't moving at that point...
Sorry for the long and probably rambling post. Those are all the details off the top of my head and this is seriously becoming a headache. I don't know if this is a hardware issue due to a broken machine (can I get a replacement?) but constantly reinstalling everything just to end up doing it again an hour later is extremely troublesome, to say the least.
It seems other XPS 420 users are having blue screen troubles, as well, so could we have a bad batch based on a specific hardware configuration?
Any help or ideas would be appreciated.