Windows 10 killed my dell xps 2710

Hi,

moral of the story ,not all people being paid to fix computer know what they are doing

Depends what side of the counter your on.

Cheers,

fdegrove said:

Hi,



Depends what side of the counter your on.

Cheers,

I actually get to go behind the counter too, lol

groze said:

Others do you think it is safe for me to keep using windows 10 on my Dell All in one Inspiron 2020 computer?

Why wouldn't it be safe? An operating system is not going physically to damage a computer.

angrycompowner said:

To all those asking if i got it fixed i haven't i still have yet to give the one person on here a chance to try at it but ive had two computer people look over it now and both have said my mother board is done im not sure what the one person did but the second i was there he opened it up and couldnt even get the mother board to throw out an error code he checked all the connections replaced the cmos battery he said he could put a fresh install of windows 8 but if theres no error codes coming from the mother board then it false hope to think that that will do anything so pretty much i have a giant paper weight or a really loud hdmi monitor ( as the model of computer they have an issue when your on hdmi that the volume will not adjust so on hdmi is stuck at 50 volume level no matter what... yay

I too had the exact same issue and have spent the best part of a week on and off to get back to a working machine. I spent a lot if time and effort figuring out what the issue was and how to fix it. I did a ton of research on this issue what with windows 10 and this specific dell machine. FYI I know a fair bit about computers and tech in general, i have built, fixed and rebuilt PCs, enjoy messing with technology and have good electronics knowledge. I worked for Microsoft for nearly 10 years as an engineer, developer and technologist - and am still floating around the industry :).

A lot of the time was spent trying to recover the actual windows install before I had to accept there was no way of recovering the windows 10 installation and having to go down the route of trying to install a fresh windows 8.1 on a new hdd/ssd.

Simply put windows 10 silently installs an Intel integrated graphics display driver that is not compatible with this chipset and motherboard combination. If you are unlucky enough to have this driver install and you start having issues with the system (strange behaviour with the start menu and how it renders on screen amongst others), its pretty inevitable that you will eventually get the black screen/no bios access situation when you next do a manual power button power down. It seems to mainly appears when the power button is used to power down the system fully.
Mine started with a shutdown loop, to which i had to hard shutdown the machine via the power button. This caused the chain events as follows: shutdown loop > manual force shutdown via power button > blue screen [WDF Violation] > blue screen [some NTFS error] > this cycled a few times, before black screening and staying there. No matter how much i punched the keyboard with all manor of key combinations, nothing - black screen (backlight on, no cursor - nothing) but hdd powers on and fans running.

Fast forward a few nights of having a large paper weight and a few calls with Dell who where next to useless, and just kept saying "its not compatible with windows 10, and sorry you are 6 months out of warranty and we don't stock or make the motherboard anymore. However if you pay us £425 we will source a mobo from china and have a tech come fit it, this will take 3-5 weeks. And when we do come, we would first format the hdd and then install the mobo and then win 8.1...". I argued, got put into "management" etc to no real avail. All they would offer is the "fix" above or a 15% discount on a XPS 2720, which is already 20% more than i paid for my top of the line 2710 2 years ago.

So the fix i managed to get working.

• Forget about windows 10, its not worth the hassle unless you want to risk installing it and capturing the offending driver and telling it not to install it - ever....
  
• Go back to windows 8.1 - go dl the Microsoft media creation tool here Creating installation media for Windows 8.1 - Windows Help
  and have it create a bootable usb for you to use. (lf course you will need a windows 8.1 licence too)
• Once you have that, i would also go to the dell site and grab the A12 bios to install too as the first thing to do when you eventually get going again
• Now comes the bit which goes against everything i know and logic would tell me works but did for me... standby....
  
  • With no luck with the supplied wireless keyboard, i plugged in a ps/2 keyboard via a ps/2 > usb adaptor (you may not need this but i like to know the pc has actually recognised the key board before mashing away at it
  • So here is the way "I" managed to get the machine back to responding
    
    • Ensuring the power cable is out the back, and you have discharged the pc by having the cable out and pushing the power button in for at least 10 seconds, a good indication of this is the rear led above the power inlet is out
    • Plug in the power cable
    • power on the machine, while simultaneously hitting the ENTER key on the keyboard, at the exact same time you will need to keep the screen active/lit up by tapping the far left capacitive button(this will bring up the screen menu and you are effectively repeatedly telling it to show the computer output - you will need to do this for around 1min, if nothing happens power down and try again - be patient - i know, i know seems ludicrous to me too...
    • Now this took a while but after a few cycles of this low and behold the dell logo appeared to which as soon as you see this hit f2 like there is no tomorrow to access the bios, don't worry depending on what state your hdd is in you will either get the boot loop/blue screen issue that this all started with or you will get a no bootable device found to which you can access the bios from here too.
    • Now its up to you what you want to do, try your luck with the UEFI boot tools to repair/recover some files or put a new hdd/ssd in to install windows 8.1 too. I personally took the route of installing windows 8.1 to the 32gb internal ssd so that once back up i could recover my files on the hdd
    • In the bios you will need to put the boot order to usb first so you can save and exit out the bios to start the installation process
    • NOTE: i wont go into all the diskpart, scandisk, fdisk stuff i tried to try and fix my drive to be able to boot, recover and flatten it.. just not worth it
    • Once you have changed the usb boot options, put your usb drive in and save and exit the bios, this will kick start the installation process and you will be on your way to a clean and more importantly fixed machine.
    • Just be sure you are happy with the loss of data if you don't have another drive handy to install to

Once it was all up and running i decided to bite the bullet and invest in a 1TB ssd to use as my primary OS disk, which has arrived been installed and had a fresh win 8.1 pro install set up. This has increased system performance pretty significantly so im happier that it took so long to fix, have the machine opened up etc.

I would also advise that when you are up and running again you intall the latest A12 dell bios and also decline and disable all windows 10 update offers. You can do this with a nice little tool called GWX_control_panel.

I hope this helps anyone out who had that sick feeling that they were looking at a £1500 paper weight.
Cheers.

DrG
My dell all-in-one system actually uses the Intel integrated graphics display driver even with windows 7. So, that why I didn't have any issues using windows 10 or windows 10 insider builds. Microsoft needs to either put a block for the Dell XPS 2710 to prevent it from upgrading or fix the driver. What is odd windows 8.1 works but 10 doesn't.

groze said:

DrG
My dell all-in-one system actually uses the Intel integrated graphics display driver even with windows 7. So, that why I didn't have any issues using windows 10 or windows 10 insider builds. Microsoft needs to either put a block for the Dell XPS 2710 to prevent it from upgrading or fix the driver. What is odd windows 8.1 works but 10 doesn't.

Do you mean you only have the integrated Intel graphics rather than the dual Intel/nvidia set up?
i have the dual but the issue is that the display used the integrated card as primary in all cases as its physically connected into it. I wonder if you don't have the dual set up if this issue is effecting the Intel 4000 chip predominantly...
Whatever the issue is, I totally agree it needs looking at by dell to be able to tell msft to roadblock the offending driver.. Tbh at this price point they should be fixing it or recalling them

DrG said:

Do you mean you only have the integrated Intel graphics rather than the dual Intel/nvidia set up?
i have the dual but the issue is that the display used the integrated card as primary in all cases as its physically connected into it. I wonder if you don't have the dual set up if this issue is effecting the Intel 4000 chip predominantly...
Whatever the issue is, I totally agree it needs looking at by dell to be able to tell msft to roadblock the offending driver.. Tbh at this price point they should be fixing it or recalling them

I don't have the nvidia graphics drivers. It listed in the device manager as Intel(R) HD Graphics.