Dell Precision R5400 with XP Pre-Installed
One of my customers have all of their office computers located in a rack, instead of under their employees' desks. This frees up desk and floor space as it is a pretty tight area. However, they were just laying desktop computers on their side instead of installing rackmount-capable systems. Fortunately, Dell sells one line of rackmount-capable workstations, Precision R5400.
Dell Precision R5400
The Precision R5400 is about twice the cost of a typical office computer, but you get some serious bang for your buck. Dual processors, better quality motherboard, RAID controller with mirrored hard drives, and high end video card. When compared to a desktop computer with similar specifications, it is actually very reasonable in price. And because Dell also offers a client-side device to remotely connect all of your workstations, you can easily eliminate all of your office computers to give your employees more space. Other solutions exist that do this as well, such as terminal server thin clients. But thin clients aren't powerful and create single points of failure for everybody.
Over the past year we have purchased five of these and none of them were ordered within a month of each other. Surprisingly, every one had the same serious problems (lock ups, freezing, blue screens). Our issues became so compounded that our Dell ticket was escalated to the highest level of support. When you reach that level, you are assigned a specific tech who works with you every day until the problem is resolved. Our tech's name was David G. and he worked with us for about a week and a half until the problem was resolved. This does not include the two months time I personally invested in this issue before calling tech support.
Before I tell you the solution, I want to reemphasize that these computers were not purchased at the same time or even in the same month. Out of the box, all of the computers had the same issue, which didn't necessarily appear immediately. I now believe that the issue is a bad Windows XP image that Dell is using on these computers. When Dell sells computers, they don't have techs clean installing Windows, installing drivers and preloading software on every single one. That would double the cost of your computer. Instead, Dell has a tech do an install on one computer, which is then cloned (imaged) and applied to the rest of the computers. While it is possible for single instances of these computers to get corrupted installations, it is very rare for a master image file to have problems because it would affect so many computers. Below are a few of the error messages we received on all of the machines.
- The driver nv4_disp for the display device \Device\Video0 got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly.
- The nv4_disp display driver has stopped working normally. Save your work and reboot the system to restore full display functionality.
- A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. The problem seems to be caused by the following file: CLASSPNP.SYS. PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA.
- The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period.
Dell had me install every version of every driver from the Intel Matrix Device to the nVidia video card. OEM drivers, Intel drivers, nVidia drivers, Windows Update drivers - you name it, we tried it. Each time it would stop a current problem (lock-ups) and create a new problem (blue screens). But in the end, the real solution was simple - Recreate the RAID array and clean install Windows XP using the most recent drivers from the Dell website.
I know this sounds trivial, but when you have multiple computers in a domain running loads of software, starting fresh is not something any tech really wants to do. Especially if you miss a file in the backup process, because it's gone. When you are migrating from one computer to another and you lose some files, you can always retrieve them from the old system. But I digress, this solution did completely resolve our issues on all of the computers.
My warning to everyone is not to stay away from this system, as it is a great platform. Instead, clean format these particular systems before you install anything on them. And while I have not ordered any preloaded with Vista or Windows 7, I can assure you that I would probably clean format those two operating systems just in case.
