"failure of windows to shut down properly"

[Rob hausman]

I have been arguing with DELL support for several weeks
now about whether this is a windows problem or a hardware
problem. They have led me on a wild goose chase so I seek
help here. Several weeks ago our 3-year old DELL (on a
small home network)now running XP for nearly a year began
to have trouble booting and when it finally did boot to
stop at the DOS screen message show above. Continung in a
normal reboot worked fine as did booting in safe mode.
The problem recurred on the next cold boot no matter which
mode. Investigation of the SETUP error messages
showed "Pre-boot error: CMOS configuration error. However,
replacing the CMOS battery did not help. Incidently, all
the HDs are correctly recognized. Warm reboots work fine
and the problems with cold boots are directly proportional
to how long the DELL is shut down (but connected to
power). Attempting to cure the problem by updating the
DELL BIOS fails as the good version of teh new BIOS on a
boot floppy yields the message "Flash data image read from
disk found to be not valid." Re-installing XP does not
help. Suggestions?

 

[Malke]

I have been arguing with DELL support for several weeks
now about whether this is a windows problem or a hardware
problem. They have led me on a wild goose chase so I seek
help here. Several weeks ago our 3-year old DELL (on a
small home network)now running XP for nearly a year began
to have trouble booting and when it finally did boot to
stop at the DOS screen message show above. Continung in a
normal reboot worked fine as did booting in safe mode.
The problem recurred on the next cold boot no matter which
mode. Investigation of the SETUP error messages
showed "Pre-boot error: CMOS configuration error. However,
replacing the CMOS battery did not help. Incidently, all
the HDs are correctly recognized. Warm reboots work fine
and the problems with cold boots are directly proportional
to how long the DELL is shut down (but connected to
power). Attempting to cure the problem by updating the
DELL BIOS fails as the good version of teh new BIOS on a
boot floppy yields the message "Flash data image read from
disk found to be not valid." Re-installing XP does not
help. Suggestions?

I think this is a hardware problem, probably with the motherboard. If
your machine is still under warranty, insist they fix it. If not,
consider trashing the Dell and moving on. I just spent 3 hours fighting
with Dell on behalf of one of my business clients. One of the 6
workstations they ordered has been a hardware lemon from Day One. I
won't bother you with the details, but Dell is sending out a new m/b
(after replacing the hard drive and RAM last week). Dell will do
everything they can think of to get you to just give up and go away.
That's one of the ways they got so successful monetarily, but their
crappy customer service is going to come back and bite them in the a**
soon.

HTH,

Malke