E4300 Fails

My E4300 arrived yesterday and I've been on the phone with Dell Customer Support all morning because the biometrics reader has decided not to respond and I'm now permanently locked out of the system.

System Specs
SP9400 2.4GHz
4GB RAM
64GB Ultra Performance SSD
Fingerprint Reader
Backlit Keyboard
Wireless 5300 + Bluetooth
XP Pro with Vista Business license (currently running XP)

I set up my fingerprint profile yesterday and since then I've had to reboot a few times to install different software. I never had any issues with the biometrics reader (other than the fact that unlike my thinkpad it wants me to authenticate myself even before the OS is loaded and that it doesn't give me the option to enter a password...and oh yeah, it's the ugliest screen I've seen in some time).

Last night, went to the movies with the wife and when I got back the laptop was low on battery. I was a little surprised because I had the 6-cell battery but I didn't care much. I figured I could investigate this morning so I just went to bed. Today, I woke up to find the laptop dead. From my conversations with the dell technician, I'm now aware that it wasn't hibernating all that time. Instead it was simply on standby and it just turns the monitor off while the computer stays on. That's a plausible explanation and I'm sure that's something that can be easily configured.

Now, the real problem. When I tried to turn it back on this morning, it took about 3 minutes just for the first screen (Dell Latitude logo) to finish loading. I had timed my boot up time with the SSD and I had clocked it at 30 secs yesterday. Once it finished doing whatever it was doing, it brought up the biometrics page and this time it wouldn't let me authenticate myself. I haven't played enough with it before it froze up so I don't know if it's normally supposed to be interactive with you like the thinkpad readers but it's completely ignoring all my attempts. Maybe that's just how the dell fingerprint reader works? In any event, I had all 10 fingers registered so I tried everything to no avail. Called technical support and after 30 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician informed me that my mobo needed to be swapped out. He also told me they may not get this done until Wednesday (4 days from now) so that should give me plenty of time to decide what I want to do with this laptop. By the way, I have the 3 year Next Business Day on-site service contract.

I've had this laptop for 18 hours by my count and it's already completely unusable. And per the technician, it must have happened when it ran out of battery. Really? Oh, I guess I'm just going to have to make sure that my laptop never accidentally runs out of battery again. I didn't realize I was getting a second job when I opted to go with a dell laptop.

As far as reviewing the rest of the laptop, it seems like a decent business line laptop. I like the build quality but the battery feels a little loose. I'm generally pleased with the keyboard and I especially love the back lit keyboard. I was trying to set this up with a dual monitor but for some reason, the windows configuration was disconnecting the other monitor every time I tried to set that up as the primary screen. I don't know if this is an issue with this laptop or not. I never had this issue with my thinkpad but I'll have to play with it a little more.

One feature that has been a big letdown is the Latitude on Ready feature and I can tell everyone right now not to really get their hopes up too much because all you can access is Outlook+Calendar+Contacts. I had read that they also give you access to a small browser but if that's the case mine didn't ship with one.

The screen is one of the brightest I've seen and I think it has very good viewing angles. It's also light and it's noticeably lighter than the M1330 with a 9 cell battery. It also seems super fast loading the OS and just doing normal things but I'm afraid I haven't had enough time with it to report anything conclusive. But overall, it seems like a step up from the old latitude laptops (I used a D620 for a couple of weeks once).

 

You got a dud, my friend, you should force them to grant you a replacement. The FP reader behavior is not normal, it should wait for your input. Over my decades in IT, I have realized that if you are spending way too much time in troubleshooting a hardware issue, rather than it working out of the box, then it is likely due to a failure more than anything else. Situations like this is precisely why I run all my Outlet portables through a 24 hour stress test using Furmark or Everest or anything else I can get to push the system to its limits. You can find out this stuff sooner or later this way.

Also, Latitude ON is not in its production form, it still requires an on-chip upgrade which is 'forthcoming' from Dell whatever the eff that means. The Reader is just a partition on your SSD that boots to a specialized version of Linux that makes the Outlook email look worse than Outlook Express from 1995.

Please utilize your 3 year NBD warranty and insist upon a replacement ASAP. If they resist, you can invoke the MBG and send it back.

 

Thanks for the response, monakh. I actually asked the technician if I can get a replacement but he said they had to change the mobo at least once before they would consider giving me a new one. I may have failed to mention this but this is an outlet machine so I'm really starting to worry that I may have picked up something that was clearly defective and was returned by its previous owner.

Yeah, I would love to get a working replacement but they're not giving me too many options right now. If I'm still having issues after the replacement, I'll probably have to just send it back.

As far as the Latitude On Ready stuff is concerned, I've seen reports dating back to early 2008 suggesting that Dell is going to start shipping out laptops with the upgraded version (including the browser) later that year but it looks like it's all false advertising. Why am I not surprised?

 

No, I think you did mention it is an Outlet unit. Regardless of why the original owner returned it, Dell should have still completely overhauled the unit before putting it back in the market. If I recall correctly, Outlet units are supposed to go through re-assembly (someone correct me if I am wrong) and the same rigorous QC checks as new units. For all intents and purposes, unless it is a scratched/dented unit and has been advertised as such, these are new units that Dell simply cannot resell legally without the refurbished sticker underneath. You can still get a dud with a brand new unit, there are enough of those stories around. It's your luck really--bit like playing Russian roulette. Yeah, I know, it sucks.

Yes, this has been false advertising where LatOn is concerned. To be fair to Dell, I am certain they tried to do this but perhaps they hit a snag when it came to the Instant ON OS licensing (I don't think they developed this themselves). However, they should stop touting the feature and issue a clarification on the future direction of the technology so our expectations, as consumers, are set.

Are you listening, Dell?

 

Not sure if yo saw my thread, but my outlet e4300 came with a dead screen. Well, not completely, but its extremely dark and needs to be fixed by dell. Kind of sad it requires work out of the box before I can even use it. I also assumed the systems had to go through some kind of test before they were shipped out. I mean, all someone had to do was turn mine on to notice the problem.

Hey Monakh, does putting it through a 24 hr stress test have any negative affects on the comp?

 

monakh, so I was finally able to log in my system after 10+ attempts. It looks like I may have a defective finger print reader but I'm not too concerned about that because I have no intentions to use it anyway. I decided I wasn't going to use it much the first time it asked me authenticate before Windows had even booted.

Now my main concern is the fact that it seems to take 2-3 mins to shut down and another 2-3 mins to restart whenever I do a hardware reboot. I know that this is not recommended but I've had to do that twice already because of this stupid finger printer reader. It looks like it completely locks down if it doesn't recognize it in the first 10 attempts so I have to keep restarting my computer to get a fresh set of 10 attempts. And unfortunately, no operating system has been loaded at that point so the only way I can reboot is using hardware restart. What I don't understand is, every time I'm forced to do that the initial latitude screen gets stuck and it takes it a good 3 minutes just to get to the authentication screen again. I don't understand what takes it so long because it's not like any OS was loaded when I did a hardware restart. If I did it in the middle of a Windows session I can see how it has to do extra work to clean up the mess I created but I don't know why it's taking its sweet time when all that happened before the manual reboot was some routine look ups on the motherboard to figure out what the hell to do next.

In any case, I think I'm going to cancel the service appointment assuming Dell can help me disable this thing over the phone. I was thinking about looking for a third party software that will allow me to integrate fingerprint support for my windows login but I'm not sure I trust my reader hardware so I think I'm just going to stay put. But I'm curious all the same. Do you guys know if there are generic software out there that will allow you to do that?

snowbrdkid: I'm really sorry about your screen buddy. These guys are clearly incompetent because I also don't know how hard it can be to see if a screen is working or not. You should let Dell know how you feel and maybe they'll realize how stupid they look and try to make amends. I really hope that you get your situation taken care of because so far the screen has been one of the brightest spots for this laptop.

 

kuchu, it looks like the dude before you set up the FP reader behavior, which tells me that since Dell didn't reset it, they didn't QC your unit either. Anyway, I am glad you got it resolved-for now, you should keep the service call though unless your issue is completely resolved.

snowbrdkid, if your stress test does something to the system , that's your indication of faulty hardware In general, all you are doing is running everything at max for 24 hours so that all components are active and under stress. Servers do this daily in the enterprise. If your laptop shuts down during a stress test, it may be indicative of a problem. At a minimum, everyone should do memtest the moment their laptop arrives. Even stressing your system for 6-8 hours should be enough to let you know that there is a problem. You don't need to go all day for that.

 

if you are shutting the computer off by holding down the power button, it's very likely the OS is running chkdsk each time it restarts, which would explain the long boot time.