Dell Computer Woes

In April 2007 I purchased a Dell Dimension E521 directly from the Dell website. This computer was a pure workhorse, perfect for me as a home production computer. I had been so pleased with this computer's performance, in fact, that I had even planned on posting at least a blog entry about its reliability.

Then one morning in October 2009 I went to boot this computer as I'd done every day for the previous two and a half years, but the computer didn't boot :-(. I fiddled around for awhile and eventually the computer did boot and of course I immediately did a full backup of all of my data. I'm thankful that I was able to do this, of course.

The computer continued to boot only intermittently (maybe 10% of the time), then eventually died completely about a month later. Luckily I had purchased a Dell Inspiron 15 (1545) laptop shortly before this time and I was able to essentially use this laptop as a desktop replacement. By hooking it up to an external monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers, I was able to replicate my previous environment, except that the Inspiron is somewhat slower than the Dimension. Even though it has more memory, its Intel dual-core processor has a slower clock speed than did the AMD dual-core that was in the Dimension.

Trying to figure out what to do, I researched the problem at the Dell and Cnet support web sites and figured out that my motherboard had died. No problem--just replace the motherboard, right? I could get a new motherboard from Dell for about $200 or a replacement from Ebay for about $60. Of course I tried the cheaper option, but I have no idea how these folks on Ebay can sell motherboards so cheaply.

The motherboard I ended up purchasing from Ebay was a slightly different model number than my original board, but I had been assured by supposedly knowledgeable folks on the Dell forums that this motherboard would indeed work just fine as a replacement.

I've been assembling and pulling apart computers since the early days so I had no problem doing the work of replacing the original broken board with the one I got on Ebay. And directly after the swap, things were looking very good. Previously, the E521 wouldn't even get to the POST (Power-On-Self-Test). But with the new board inside, it did indeed immediately go into POST and everything passed just fine: the motherboard could see all the components--the CPU, PCI cards, disks, etc. and it was able to complete a full memory test as well. This was very good news.

But when the newly installed replacement motherboard tried to boot the operating system (Vista) from the hard drive, it failed. Some further internet research told me that the reason for this was likely due to an old version of firmware. That is, early versions of the firmware would boot XP, but in order to boot Vista (which I had on my disk), the firmware had to be updated.

Now here's where the story gets a little bit interesting. In order to boot Vista, I would have to upgrade the firmware on this replacement motherboard. However, in the process of researching the problem originally, I had run across posts by folks stating that when they did a firmware upgrade on their motherboard, the motherboard stopped working in exactly the same way that my original board broke: that is, it wouldn't even go into POST.

A real catch 22 here: don't upgrade the firmware and I can't use my computer. Upgrade the firmware, and I risk ruining a second motherboard. I had no choice unfortunately, and of course when I tried to upgrade the firmware, the motherboard immediately stopped working.

I finally tried again calling Dell support to see if they could help, and basically their response was: "If you had purchased our $200 board instead of the $60 from Ebay, it would work".

I had become extremely frustrated throughout this whole process. I was disappointed with the support I got from Dell (essentially zero support--no responses to my forum postings, and no help at all via phone). And I'm extremely disappointed that (a) the older version of the firmware would not boot Vista and (b) upgrading the firmware hosed the motherboard. My frustration continues because there are likely some Dell engineers out there who are very familiar with this issue and might even know about a fix for me, but they won't talk to me because this particular computer is no longer under warranty.

This whole process has left me with a very bad taste in my mouth concerning Dell computers, and it very likely means that I will not ever purchase another Dell. I've owned four Dells over the years, but this incident has likely ended my relationship with Dell. I still have a ten-year-old Acer laptop that still runs just fine and I thus suspect I'll be looking to Acer for future computer purchases.

The only recourse remaining is for me to take the Dell apart and try to sell the (working) components on Ebay myself. Not the two motherboards, of course, both of which are basically hosed beyond repair, but certainly the memory, PCI boards, CPU and Power Supply. Hopefully my misfortune in this adventure can be someone else's good fortune in getting cheap working components. I will likely get an external USB dual-drive enclosure that supports SATA disks to try to re-task the two 250-GB hard drives.