Brennan’s Blog

The new computer that I ordered from Dell has been a nightmare. It is a Dimension C521 with an Athlon 64 processor and 4GB of memory. What I got a was a Vista 32 bit installation with Vista Home Premium which cannot run Virtual PC due to licensing limitations. Vista 32 bit can also only address 3GB of memory so the extra 1GB is being ignored completely.

So what is the logical thing to do? I installed Vista 64 bit Ultimate Edition so that I could run Virtual PC with all 4GB of the memory I purchased. That was a mistake. When the Vista 64 bit installation does the final reboot I kept getting the blue screen with a strange error that I learned was due to the BIOS not supporting more than 3GB of memory. The system booted fine under Vista 32 bit because it safely stayed within those bounds. To correct the problem I spent some time chatting with Dell technical support over the issue and eventually they pointed me to a BIOS update for this apparently known issue after sending me a computer with 4GB of memory and an older version of the BIOS which has this problem.

Alright, you would think that would be the solution to get me back on track. I just had to remove the 4th memory stick and boot into Vista 64 bit and run that BIOS updater. There you would be wrong. The installer does not run in Vista 64 bit, so I installed Vista 32 bit just to run the installer. The update supposedly should just take a few minutes but after an hour I knew something was wrong. It seemed to be locked up so I crossed my fingers and powered down the machine and attempted a restart. No BIOS, no boot screen.

So I got back into the chat with Dell technical support which gave me the run around for a few hours until they finally said that I really had to talk to customer support. When I finally talked with customer support, and they confirmed they did in fact send me a computer with all of these problems they set me up with a technician would come to my office and replace the now fried motherboard. Fine. I just wasted a whole weekend that I thought was going to be productive. I may as well at least have a usable computer by next weekend.

The technician came to my office surprisingly on time. He gave me a window of 9 to 2 and was there at 9:01. He replaced the motherboard in record time and seemed like a very competent guy. I left the Vista 32 installation in place so that I could focus on other tasks at hand and just ignored the new boot messages I was seeing. It seems the boot order is all crazy now. It tries to do a network boot off of a DHCP server and there is no option in the BIOS to turn that off. It was also complaining about another hardware issue. Oh well.

So after plugging in external my hard drives that hold all of my files and virtual machines I seemed to be back in business, although the machine did not really seem all that fast. Over the weekend I decided to give it the ultimate stress test. I installed and started a game of single player Starcraft for a quick match against the Zerg. About 5 minutes in the game I got a blue screen. This was very frustrating. I just turned the computer off and left it sit. I later powered it back up and assumed it was just a problem with Starcraft running on Vista, although a blue screen error is very discouraging.

Finally today I discovered something that the Dell technician missed. I was running Visual Studio in the virtual instance of Vista for several hours and even though the processor said it was idle nearly the entire time it was extremely slow and kept getting slower until it was unbearable. It got me thinking. Ever since the motherboard was replaced the BIOS seemed to have a problem with the hardware. I also noticed that machine was extremely quiet. The reason, the fan was not running at all.

I powered down the machine and took a look inside. The fan was not powered at all. The wire was just dangling very near the connector which would power it up. That explains why it was so slow. The processor dropped the clock speed to reduce the heat it could not dissipate since the fan was not running. I powered it back online and in a few minutes once the fan was able to blow cold air over the heat sink the machine actually started to feel faster than a Pentium 2.

I still have not tried to run Starcraft again or to install Vista 64 bit. I just took out the 4th memory chip and put in the drawer. When I have unlimited time I will have to go through the headache of trying to make this machine do what it should have been able to do the day it arrived from Dell. I wish Apple sold a $1000 tower. I'd happily run VMWare or Parallels on that sort of machine for my work in Visual Studio. I am pretty certain that if I order a machine with 4GB of memory from Apple that it would work, and there is only one edition of MacOS X so it should run everything that a Mac should run. All of these Vista editions is just lame. There are many lame things about Vista. I will have to put together my wish list for SP2 and post it with links to the MS feedback center. There is no good reason why Vista has to be as terrible as it is.