Hands on Dell Precision 7710

Received 7710 march 10. Blue screens, 2-3 times a day, every day. Back and forth with ProSupport, nothing worked. They sent me new hard drive and onsite technician to replace hard drive...but they sent the wrong hard drive....after much argument with Dell, they are sending me a new unit. I have little confidence they will get this right, but I am not keeping the lemon I have.

 

what are the specs of the system and what OS?

 

Win 7 pro (10 downgrade)

32GB (4x8GB) 2133MHz DDR4 ECC Memory

Internal Dual Pointing Backlit Keyboard (English)

Nvidia Quadro M4000M w/4GB GDDR5

Intel Wireless 8260A Driver

512GB M.2 PCIe High Performance Solid State Drive, MPWS

Intel Dual Band Wireless 8260 (802.11ac) W/ Bluetooth

Intel Xeon E3-1535M v5 (Quad Core 2.90GHz, 3.80GHz Turbo, 8MB 45W, w/Intel HD Graphics P530)

Smart Card and Thunderbolt 3

17.3 UltraSharp UHD IGZO(3840x2160) Wide View Anti-Glare LED-backlit

 

Are they doing an advance exchange? If so, since you are getting a new one anyway, maybe try changing from AHCI to RAID or RAID to AHCI (whichever your in now). With Win 10 you can switch without reinstalling. Same steps may work in Win 7 (not sure).

Also maybe try Win 10 to see if you have issues with that on the machine.

on the latest bios?

 

Went through the whole list of bios drivers, etc....nothing worked.
I am not a fan of Win10. Need a stable proven OS for work so sticking with 7 till WIN10 gets better. No RAID now....not sure what an advanced exchange is, but i hold onto lemon until i receive the exchange unti

 

In the Bios, is it set to RAID or AHCI? The default setting is RAID, even if you are not running RAID. AHCI may use a different driver and maybe that will not have the BSOD (just guessing).

Here is a post where I tried the switching in Win 10

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ns-press-release.782179/page-73#post-10223273

I like Win 10 better than Win 7. I use it for both work and home. I remember going from 7 to 8 and hated it at first. Once I got use to it, not bad. 10 has been stable for me on several machines (M6700, 7710, T7910, XPS8700, MS Surface Pro 2, 3, and 4 and even an old Precision 670 and 390).

Just curious if you get the BSOD with Win 10 as well. Since you are getting a new system anyway (and if you have the time), might be worth a try with a clean install of 10 using the MS Download.

 

With Windows 8/10, you can switch disk controller modes by just going to safe mode once. With Windows 7 this process doesn't work. You have to make a registry change immediately before switching.
Steps can be found many places including here.

Personally I always run AHCI even though the system comes set to RAID (even if you have no RAID disks defined). Then you can run without loading the Intel disk controller driver, which I've had trouble with before (including BSOD issues).

[Edit]
BlueScreenView can usually show you what is causing your BSOD. Usually it is a non-Microsoft driver. You can try disabling the device or switching to a generic driver to see if your problem goes away. If it happens to be the Intel disk controller driver, switching to AHCI (and then switching to the generic Microsoft disk controller driver) could eliminate your problem. The generic driver may not be able to recognize NVM disks on Windows 7, though.

 

Appreciate your advice. But I am done being a science project after 5 days. Time for dell to deliver a working unit that I paid for.

My feeling is prosupport tech (and his supervisor) should know about the bios set up and the specs of my unit.

 

I understand and can relate. My only concern would be if it is a driver issue, a new machine with the same hardware, same OS, and same drivers may cause the same issue.

 

Nvidia drivers have been causing crashes with Adobe products that use gpu acceleration.