Dell E520 Problem?

comicmankev

Along with a lot of people on here, I bought the E520 when it was cheap. I had no add-ons, except for a card reader.

Since new (only a couple of weeks), the PC is slow to respond, even to basic tasks like opening Word. I put an SD card with 400 pictures on it in the reader, and it took about 2 hours to load the thumbnails for them.

Now, I notice the hard drive is constantly making a noise like it is doing something, and the HD LED is always flickering.

Theres no virus, I've checked everything in device manager, and nothing seems to be using much resources in task manager.

Anyone got any ideas? How would I put this over to Dell?

fox2319

A couple of ideas:

1 = What type of antivirus have you got on it?
2 = Is it downloading updates?
3 = Have you put in any software since new?

Check out task manager (right click on the bar at the bottom and select it), see which processes are taking up all the cpu time.

Hope that helps?

Jeff

comicmankev

No new software, apart from Office 2007 pro. It is a Dell so does come with a load of added rubbish on there.

As for task manager, already checked that and only 2 items taking up 01 CPU and they are iexplore (obviously!) and dwm.exe.

Antivirus is AVG and is updating reguarly, and fully up to date to the minute when checked.

Thanks for the help, any other suggestions?

DellCA

comicmankev wrote: »

Along with a lot of people on here, I bought the E520 when it was cheap. I had no add-ons, except for a card reader.

Since new (only a couple of weeks), the PC is slow to respond, even to basic tasks like opening Word. I put an SD card with 400 pictures on it in the reader, and it took about 2 hours to load the thumbnails for them.

Now, I notice the hard drive is constantly making a noise like it is doing something, and the HD LED is always flickering.

Theres no virus, I've checked everything in device manager, and nothing seems to be using much resources in task manager.

Anyone got any ideas? How would I put this over to Dell?

Hi,

My name is Todd and I'm with Dell's online outreach program to help customers via blogs and forums. You said the hard drive is always making noise, do you mean that it is making an excessive amount of noise, or just that it's constantly active?

If it's making a normal amount of noise but is always active it could be that it's accessing the page file continuously, or trying to read files off the drive to load into memory.

You didn't mention how much memory you have in the computer or what operating system you have installed on it.

All Dell systems come with a diagnostics utility on them that you may want to run. To run it you would restart the system and at the Dell splash screen (before Windows begins to load) hit the <F12> button to go into the boot menu. One of the options should be for the Dell utility or diagnostics partition, select that.

Once in the diagnostics you can set them to run either on selected components or the entire system. At first I would recommend running the diagnostics on the hard drive, memory, and processor to see whether it finds any errors. (If it does write down the component and the error code that is given.) If no errors are found then I would recommend running the diagnostics on the entire system.

Depending on the size of your hard drive the diagnostic to test that can take a while, and to run the entire diagnostic on the system can take a few hours so try to do it when you have time to let the system sit and run.

Let me know if any of this helps. I'll stop back to see if I can help you further.

Thank you,

Todd

Customer Advocate
Dell, Inc.

http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/11/19/3648.aspx

spend_spend_spend

DellCA wrote: »

Hi,

My name is Todd and I'm with Dell's online outreach program to help customers via blogs and forums.

That's what I call service!

comicmankev

DellCA wrote: »

Hi,

My name is Todd and I'm with Dell's online outreach program to help customers via blogs and forums. You said the hard drive is always making noise, do you mean that it is making an excessive amount of noise, or just that it's constantly active?

If it's making a normal amount of noise but is always active it could be that it's accessing the page file continuously, or trying to read files off the drive to load into memory.

You didn't mention how much memory you have in the computer or what operating system you have installed on it.

All Dell systems come with a diagnostics utility on them that you may want to run. To run it you would restart the system and at the Dell splash screen (before Windows begins to load) hit the <F12> button to go into the boot menu. One of the options should be for the Dell utility or diagnostics partition, select that.

Once in the diagnostics you can set them to run either on selected components or the entire system. At first I would recommend running the diagnostics on the hard drive, memory, and processor to see whether it finds any errors. (If it does write down the component and the error code that is given.) If no errors are found then I would recommend running the diagnostics on the entire system.

Depending on the size of your hard drive the diagnostic to test that can take a while, and to run the entire diagnostic on the system can take a few hours so try to do it when you have time to let the system sit and run.

Let me know if any of this helps. I'll stop back to see if I can help you further.

Thank you,

Todd

Customer Advocate
Dell, Inc.

http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/11/19/3648.aspx

I'd heard Dell were going to take over the world, this is quite amazing how you stumbled across this thread!

Anyway. It's on Vista with a gig of Ram. I believe the card reader has not been attached to the chasis as it wobbles quite a lot and is set back further than it should be. The last dell I had they had forgotten to plug the internal power cable to the motherboard and the CD drive, so I guessed this may have happened this time.

I am unfortunately stuck in bed at the moment following an operation, but as soon as I'm recovered I will try the diagnostics.

Thanks for you help!

ubergeek

spend_spend_spend wrote: »

That's what I call service!

I'm sorry........I'm feeling quite stunned.....I've never, ever seen service like this before.

Congrats to Dell.

Almost makes up for using custom connectors on yer parts ;-)

:T

Crabman

comicmankev wrote: »

Along with a lot of people on here, I bought the E520 when it was cheap. I had no add-ons, except for a card reader.

Since new (only a couple of weeks), the PC is slow to respond, even to basic tasks like opening Word. I put an SD card with 400 pictures on it in the reader, and it took about 2 hours to load the thumbnails for them.

Now, I notice the hard drive is constantly making a noise like it is doing something, and the HD LED is always flickering.

Theres no virus, I've checked everything in device manager, and nothing seems to be using much resources in task manager.

Anyone got any ideas? How would I put this over to Dell?

I'm having this problem too, same as you with 1GB RAM and Vista Home Premium. HDD always seems to be up to something and yesterday a program called dllhost.exe was using up significant CPU but that turned out to be a legit windows program. I'm using Avast antivirus and the windows 'advanced' firewall.

And snap, I also have a wobbly card reader too. I don't know whether you get this but if I connect my SD Card to upload pics, then click to remove it safely, it disconnects the entire card reader meaning I can't then use another card unless I restart the PC, that's quite annoying.

Brilliant post by DellCA, I'll give that a try... :beer:

DellCA

comicmankev wrote: »

I'd heard Dell were going to take over the world, this is quite amazing how you stumbled across this thread!

That's kind of funny actually. The other day they had us do these personality tests to see how well we work with others on our team and organization and one of the quotes the computerized response gave to my exam was "Trying to take over the world with my intellect".... I'm still trying to figure out if the computer was trying to insult me or compliment me.

:rotfl:

It sounds like you and crabman could have loose card readers in the system. Those things are physically so small they are hard to secure in the chassis. I'd recommend opening them up to see if maybe something has worked lose?

Crabman, that's kind of strange that the system would do that. It's not supposed to turn off the reader totally when it's removed. Let me ask around and see if anyone else is seeing the same issues.

As for the performance and HDD always seeming to be active that could be a few different things. Any idea how many applications are normally running in the background on your system? Vista uses so much memory that at times I think even 1gb of memory isn't enough. I know with my Vista machine at home I had it running with 2 gb.

Todd

Customer Advocate
Dell, Inc.

brinky_2

I have a DELL 5150 with a similar memory card reader problem. With mine a MMC crashes it but an SD doesnt even though they use the same slot. Do you get some sort of generic windows usb driver error before it crashes?

I posted this question on a similar subject before

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=439975&highlight=brinky

It seems to be a common problem with DELL and HP machines. For mine they suggested updating the BIOS but I was a bit worried doing this in case I killed the machine.

wakandem

just be sure there is not a current scan - virus or some other scheduled or start up scan going on, these can sometimes take up to an hour to complete and the pc is virtually useless during it. I tend to disable scheduled scans for this reason and run them manually when going out for a bit or bed