Student in distress- Dell Inspiron Drive/Port failure

creased-leach

Hi all, I'm hoping someone out there can help my DD with her laptop issue. I've been telling her to get her a**e signed up to MSE for ages- so I'll do the post myself, and prove that there's a good reason I'm "MSE obssesed!" :rolleyes: in the process.

She has an Inspiron, I think it's a 1525, bought 7ish months ago from Tesco. One by one the USB ports have dropped dead, and now the disk drive has packed in...

I'm not expecting a miracle cure, but wondered if someone techie knows if:

it's likely to be a hardware or software issue? Are there any tests she can do to determine what's up? (Idiot terms please, she's even less techy than me- shameful really! :eek:)

Based on the above, hopefully she can decide wether taking it back to Mr T's is an option. As you can imagine, the lappy is pretty useless with no connectivity, and it's a really important time for her.

Now, she'll have to create an account here so she can see what I've been saying about her...:D

Muchos Gracios!

gaming_guy

well, i'm assuming its running vista

for the usb port, its likely to be a hardware issue if the rest work ok.

for the cd drive, if you press the windows key + r and type devmgmt.msc into the run box & press enter (click continue on the prompt), do you get any yellow triangles with exclamation marks in them next to dvd/cd drives (you may have to double click it)?

SimbaSimon

USB ports very rarely go wrong unless its with a connection issue inside the laptop. Usually when you plug something in windows will either popup or make a noise to say something has plugged in, if your not getting any of these I'd say its a hardware issue.

The cd drive is a little harder to work out, it could be hardware but as the laptop is fairly new I'd tend to point it towards a software issue. I had one pc where the cd drive wouldn't work and doing a system restore to an earlier date fixed this. If you know when the cd drive was working you can try restoring the PC to an earlier date and see if this fixes it.

As your still under warranty I'd check its all registered with dell (if you buy it from dell direct its automatically registered but I believe tesco you'll have to register the service tag manually. Give them a call, I've had their repair service out before and they are very good. It may take a phone call or 2 for them to diagnose it however usually once they know they can get a callout the next day free of charge. None of this send your laptop to Japan rubbish.

macman

When you say the disk drive, I assume you mean the DVD drive, not the hard drive? When you say 'packed in', do you mean it won't open, won't read, won't write-can you be more specific?
But almost certainly a hardware fault from what you have said.
There is a diagnostic facility on Dell's that you can run to tell you where the problem might be, accessing this will be explained in the laptop's manual.
Then since it's still under warranty, just call up Dell and they'll tell you what to do. But make sure you backup your data before you send it back, as they might change the hard drive or do a resinstall as part of the repair process.

TheAsparagusLady

Hey everyone,

I'm the daughter with the deceased laptop who finally has an MSE account! Yay!

Thanks a lot for the advice - basically none of my USB/SD slots would connect to anything - kept telling me I had to format the disks I was trying to use, which had worked perfectly fine with the laptop before! Then the DVD drive decided it was gonna stop reading burnt disks and CDROMs.

All moderately annoying! But after having called into Dell's helpline my lovely operating system is all restored back to factory settings - a bit of a faff but its fixed!

One of my USB sticks is still giving me the same message, so I'm assuming it must've been something wrong with that one and keeping it well away from the computer!

Thanks for all your suggestions!

M4RKM

aaah.. the age old rebuild it to factory settings..... how i love windows....

totalsolutions

>One by one the USB ports have dropped dead, and now the disk drive

Did not sound like hardware to me, these are all driven by software.