Dell problem of the day
We have a stack of 5-6 machines that just won’t work for us, they have various random problems. For one of them, it would just lock up after being up for some period of time (generally under 24 hours).
Of course, the only real way to get them to identify the problem is with their diagnostic CDs, but those only show errors of the worst kind — we have machines that won’t even boot an OS, but pass all those tests.
We eventually got them to look at memtest86 output, which was showing errors. It turns out that those errors weren’t really showing the root cause, there’s lots of people who have problems with their dell hardware, where 3rd party tools show issues, but the dell diagnostics don’t.
So, we got pieces replaced one by one, and now supposedly everything has been replaced (we weren’t watching over them the entire time), and still it locks up after just sitting there for a few hours after it’s booted.
It won’t do it when it’s sitting there running the memory tests, so I’m not sure exactly what to make of it. We left it going in a loop for days and there were no lockups.
We took the drive and RAM from it and put them in another 1750 and it works great, so there’s obviously some problem with the hardware, I just have no idea what.
