Dell problems Installing

[BILL S]

I bought a closeout of PC barebones, several GX270 and GX280s, the 270s are harder to figure out when not working, however, the GX280 appear to directly suffer from bent PGA775 pins on the motherboard, unlike the straight pin on CPUs past, these appear much harder for a user to repair, can they fix bent pins at local repair shops, etc?

The other Dell desktop I obtained was a Precision 9150 (XPS 400 series) and it will POST, in fact, go into the BIOS and will try to boot, it sees drives attached but continues to freeze up when booting a Windows 9x or Windows XP, it freezes at the end of loading all drivers and Startup says it's starting Windows, on the blue and white text screen, it stays frozen with no more activity. What can cause this??

It booted my Acer 4710 hard drive which is SATA but did not boot a working XP install on the Acer using SATA/RAID added drivers.

Because the Vista OS from the Acer did boot up, I was really surprised and I video taped the result for YouTube. Since I wiped the Vista for malware free XP instead, I've not had any success since.

One solution, though hard to do, is try Windows Vista on a Acer formatted 4710 series that would replicate the find, and possibly Windows 7 might work, I can only speculate.

The other Dell issue I'm dealing with is Dell's Netbook like LS Latitude, it has 500Mhz integrated and one SODIMM module, uses PXE to boot from a Network, but it seems to only initiate when there is no Hard Drive present. It acts like my Acer 4710 which is BIOS locked, only looks at the HDD and it's formatting instead of external boot which activates when the drive is removed. I tried installing the drive after an external startup of XP is going on, but it causes a reboot of the entire system, or other errors. Not Hot pluggable I guess.

Ideas on any of these issues??

[sennetor]

Hi Bill, I had typed out a big long reply to this earlier but it somehow crashed on me. Doh.

basically I said
Check the 270 motherboards for swollen caps.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&rlz=1W1GGIE_en&um=1&sa=1&q=swollen+caps+gx270&aq=f&oq=&aqi=&start=0

The T-Socket bent pins can be coaxed back into shape with
-a steady hand.
-watchmakers screwdriver.
-large magnifying glass & lamp stand.
-patience & a lot of time.
PC Repair Shops will charge you a lot of money since it can take up to an hour to repair just a dozen pins & its never gauranteed

Sell the precision as its not worth the effort- or boot to a live cd & flash the bios.

For the Acer you will need to get a hold of a USB Floppy drive and press F6 during windows setup or slipstream the SATA drivers into a Windows XP CD.
http://komku.blogspot.com/2007/08/install-windows-xp-on-acer-aspire-4710.html

For the Dell X1 X100 or LS you will need to find a USB CD-Rom drive or swap the drive into another dell notebook(with a CD drive). Boot to UBCD, Clone the windows installation CD onto the blank drive & create a second partition on the remaining space.
When you put the drive back into the LS it should start windows setup automatically and just select the second partition. :) I think this will work but I've never tried such a mad work around. :P

[BILL S]

The Precision could use a new mobo but it does try and bootup, so I am most hopeful in finding the issue a work-around. The Acer I mentioned has had the proper XP install via SATA controller it required, however, it is still a split partition with Windows ME to get a formatted drive to work from! When the 30 day install was down to 15 days I think, it upgraded to SP3 via the online Networking and it added another 30 day term to the install I did! That was a nice perk so I didn't have to wipe it out again so soon.
SP3 has hidden benefit. The Precision casing could accept a new mobo, the 270s were fine in the cap department, they looked physically fit but I only got orange/amber on the power light, I believe the fans were working though.