#1 ·
Hey everyone,
About a month ago, my girlfriend picked up this Dell over at Best Buy.
It came pre-loaded with MS-DOS, so I took care of installing Windows 10—the same version I run on several other laptops without any hiccups. However, after a little while, things started getting weird. At completely random intervals (we're talking 3 or 4 times per charge), a warning would pop up right in the middle of the screen saying the battery was at 6%, only for everything to return to normal two or three seconds later. This doesn't happen when the laptop is plugged into the charger. On top of that, the display occasionally glitches out while using browsers; I can't quite put my finger on it, but there’s this heavy distortion where black and white colors stretch out diagonally across the screen.
Assuming it was just a missing driver issue, I went to the official Dell support site and pulled down their driver scanner tool. The very first thing it suggested was a BIOS update. Being optimistic, I figured a stale BIOS might actually be the culprit, so I went ahead and flashed it. Immediately after, the machine refused to boot in UEFI mode (though I can't be certain if it was set to Legacy before I installed Windows). It felt like it was stuck in a loop: I'd enter the boot menu, select the option to boot from the ATA drive, and the screen would just go black for a second before kicking me right back to the same menu. It didn't seem limited to the hard drive either, because the same thing happened when I tried booting from a USB drive. Once I switched the settings back to Legacy mode, I'd see the standard white logo on a black background, which looks like this logo
The battery issue persists, and now I'm left scratching my head over why it won't boot in UEFI mode. I eventually wiped it and installed Windows 8.1; while it behaves slightly better, that annoying battery glitch is still popping up.
Since these glitches are sporadic and brief, I don't feel like I have enough "hard evidence" to justify a warranty claim or sending it off for service. That said, the boot issues have seriously shaken my confidence in this machine. To make matters worse, after running a Windows update on Windows 8.1—which had been working perfectly fine until today—the desktop icons vanished. When I navigated to this PC, I got an error stating the desktop folder couldn't be found in the system32/config/ directory.
I'd really appreciate some insight here. For a brand-new laptop, the behavior is highly suspicious, and I'm starting to suspect there might be underlying hardware flaws.
About a month ago, my girlfriend picked up this Dell over at Best Buy.
It came pre-loaded with MS-DOS, so I took care of installing Windows 10—the same version I run on several other laptops without any hiccups. However, after a little while, things started getting weird. At completely random intervals (we're talking 3 or 4 times per charge), a warning would pop up right in the middle of the screen saying the battery was at 6%, only for everything to return to normal two or three seconds later. This doesn't happen when the laptop is plugged into the charger. On top of that, the display occasionally glitches out while using browsers; I can't quite put my finger on it, but there’s this heavy distortion where black and white colors stretch out diagonally across the screen.
Assuming it was just a missing driver issue, I went to the official Dell support site and pulled down their driver scanner tool. The very first thing it suggested was a BIOS update. Being optimistic, I figured a stale BIOS might actually be the culprit, so I went ahead and flashed it. Immediately after, the machine refused to boot in UEFI mode (though I can't be certain if it was set to Legacy before I installed Windows). It felt like it was stuck in a loop: I'd enter the boot menu, select the option to boot from the ATA drive, and the screen would just go black for a second before kicking me right back to the same menu. It didn't seem limited to the hard drive either, because the same thing happened when I tried booting from a USB drive. Once I switched the settings back to Legacy mode, I'd see the standard white logo on a black background, which looks like this logo
The battery issue persists, and now I'm left scratching my head over why it won't boot in UEFI mode. I eventually wiped it and installed Windows 8.1; while it behaves slightly better, that annoying battery glitch is still popping up.
Since these glitches are sporadic and brief, I don't feel like I have enough "hard evidence" to justify a warranty claim or sending it off for service. That said, the boot issues have seriously shaken my confidence in this machine. To make matters worse, after running a Windows update on Windows 8.1—which had been working perfectly fine until today—the desktop icons vanished. When I navigated to this PC, I got an error stating the desktop folder couldn't be found in the system32/config/ directory.
I'd really appreciate some insight here. For a brand-new laptop, the behavior is highly suspicious, and I'm starting to suspect there might be underlying hardware flaws.