Yep, for over a week now (since right after I got the JF-17 installed and flying), my still new (year & 4 month old) Dell XPS 8930 took a sudden and not so dramatic dump. I walked out of the room and it was one and working, came back in and to a black screen and thought I had a power failure (a loose cord/cable/surge protector, etc). Checked everything, PC refused to start, totally dead other than a flashing amber light on the power button. I called Dell Premium Support and started the ball rolling and after over an hour on the phone with them, no joy, the power supply BIT wouldn't even cooperate! They were as stumped as I was. At first they were going to send me a shipping box and pre-paid FedEx Express label to bring the PC into their depot in Texas for repair but then they called me back to tell me they were sending a field technician at the beginning of the week with parts they suspected that needed to be replaced. The tech didn't get to me this past Monday due to one of the parts not arriving at their depot so they rescheduled for Tuesday afternoon. The tech arrived that day/afternoon and replaced the Motherboard and Power Supply but guess what, the PC still refused to start!!! He called Dell field tech support, all of us were still stumped. At that moment, we decided to overnight the PC to the repair depot. FedEx picked up my PC on Thursday afternoon, it was received at the depot in Texas early yesterday morning, they notified me of receiving and initiating diagnostics and repairs and that they were going to expedite things as fast as possible. I was told 4 to 10 days. This afternoon, I was surprised when FedEx delivered my PC back to me! That was under a 48 hour turnaround door to door.
It's good to go, more or less a factory fresh PC. I did loose my data which was on the system at the time but that's okay, everything is backed up. I usually save everything using Acronis True Image but I also manually backup most things on my storage drives.
Dell repair depot did not explain what they thought may have been wrong. Since a new MB and Power Supply had been installed, the depot also went ahead and replaced the CPU as well. Prior to this failure, I had experienced the widely reported "5 second freeze" issue with my OS where the Keyboard, Mouse and all functions related to the OS would freeze for 5 seconds and with no particular time interval or pattern. Many reported that the cause of the freezing had to due with a bug in W10 which was related to the Power Management Settings but no matter what recommended fix I tried, the problem persisted as it had since this past May. Not sure if this failure was related or not or maybe the freezing was the CPU going bad? I can only suspect. As a precaution, I am not going to use my Acronis restore to set it back to where it was, just going to fit everything back on section at a time even if it takes me a bit. I see in just over one week of being out of action, I have missed a good bit already but will get caught up soon enough.
BTW, I will be soliciting advice of some of your PC builders soon, I am going to build another PC for performance for DCS, P3Dv4, and the forthcoming MSFS 2020 and use this PC as a backup mirror (as much as possible) and as a primary coms device.
Anyhow, just wanted to chime in after my brief absence and why, hope everyone as doing well and I look forward to getting back up and virtual flying and interacting here soon.
Originally Posted by rvn817j
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