timbrown.us - Personal Blog of Tim Brown

Dell XPS 8930 Woes

As much as I would like to say my experience with the new Dell XPS 8930 tower computer has been uneventful, I can’t say that and regret this purchase after my experience with Dell support and their attempted repair. The issue started at the end of May when the built-in SD Card reader quit working. I had just used it the week before to inventory a bunch of cards I had lying around. And better to know I can reformat them in the camera without worry I that had not yet imported them into Lightroom. The only updates applied to the system through Windows update or the Dell Support Assistant application. One of the Dell updates, probably the Bios, made the card reader quit working. On June 6th, I called Dell support and they had me try things and one was to kick off diagnostics on the card reader through the Support Assistant program. The test failed and Support made a remote connection to my system for further troubleshooting. By the time support gave up, the card reader could not even be located by Dell Support Assistant diagnostics as the device no longer showed as a testable device. Support left me to try a system restore to try and bring the device back. That effort was a no go initially, as Windows wanted the system is a special boot mode to do the restore. Once the restore was complete, still no card reader. I felt sort of abandoned by Dell Support and they finally sent an e-mail inquiring on the situation and I responded that the card reader was still missing. They gave me the last option of sending it in for repair stating the motherboard that provided the connection for the card reader was bad and would be replaced. I sent the computer to Houston for service and status updates were nil until they had the device several days. Finally, the status moved to diagnostics and repair phase and stayed in this status for almost a week. Finally, I get notified that the repair was complete and the system was about to be shipped back.

I got the system back on Monday, July 6th, and reinstalled my data drives. Upon booting the system, I was greeted by the initial Windows 10 setup prompts as the OS had been wiped and reinstalled. No biggie, I had my data drives and backups if needed. The real shocker here was all of the Dell provided support programs like Waves Maxx and Dell Support programs like Support Assistant were no where to be found. I visited Dell Support on the web and there were no needed driver updates, so I decided to test the SD Card Reader. I inserted a card and waited for Windows to recognize the card insertion only to never have that notice appear. I go to the Dell support website so I can get Support Assistant back and open it so I can check the card reader diagnostics, guess what? The card reader is not detected and therefore not present in the list of devices Support Assistant can troubleshoot. This is my photo imaging workstation and loses a lot of convenience when I have to give up a USB 3.0 port and deal with an external reader. All of my previous builds, I bought 3.5″ internal readers to mount within the front bays on the case for convenience and not dealing with an USB reader.

At this point, I am beyond frustrated. I read the Dell repair sheet that came back with the computer and it says they replaced the I/O daughter board for the card reader. Unless my 35+ years of being an IT guy supporting desktops from before Windows and now as a senior forensic analyst for a fortune 50 insurer has left me brain dead, there is no daughter board to be had on this computer. The only thing I can think they may be referencing is the actual card reader slot itself which is directly connected to the motherboard and provides nothing but the connection for the card via the slot. Unless I am mistaken, the brains for the reader are on the motherboard as support stated several times that the reader was part of the Intel chipset.

I vented with a #dellsucks tag on twitter and got the attention of @DellCares and now I have new support ticket. Not sure what they think I am going to do to assist them. I am pretty disheartened with my efforts and the non-repair of the system after shipping it to them and waiting. While some may think I am just using this experience to bash Dell, I have a Dell XP laptop that I was still using to program Ham radios until I virtualized it in May. I use a Dell Precision dual Xeon system as my on-net corporate forensics tower at work and it’s been very reliable and the company has moved from HP’s to Dell for all our endpoint PC systems. Other than quirks trying to boot systems via USB Linux so I can get a forensic image of the internal drive, these systems have been pretty solid in the first year of the transition. I guess the biggest unknown for me now is trying figure what Dell is going to want me to do next. I honestly don’t have the patience to deal with the situation and have bought a USB card reader so my photos can get imported. If Dell doesn’t offer a solution that requires more than minimal effort, I will investigate returning the system as defective to Costco or let the Costco concierge team deal with Dell to get a replacement.

UPDATE:

As I stated, @DellCares opened a Dell Service ticket for me on the matter and I checked the status and asked for an update today, only to check the ticket a few hours later to find it closed. WTF #DELL. #DELLSUCKS more and more each day I deal with this no service response. @COSTCO needs to step up to the plate and make it right or quit selling #dell. I get your a large behemoth that probably doesn’t give a flip about the consumer market, but when I spend my hard earned money on something I expect it to work; especially if I have made the effort to return it for repair and it comes back still broken. #DELLSUCKS I am in #DELLHELL! (and I didn’t even know about Jeff Jarvis until I googled how bad Dell’s customer service reputation actually is.) @DellCares on twitter responded to my most recent post and DM about the ticket getting closed and this is what they asked:

Hi, I am sorry for the confusions. Let’s run diagnostics on the system to check for any hardware failures. This video will guide you: https://dell.to/2WCTgwk. If you see any errors, capture images and share them with me. Note: Keep the charger connected to the system during the test. Also, click ‘No’ when prompted for extended memory test. -Pratheepan.

My Response: “If you go look at the ticket support closed without speaking to me, you see I posted screen captures showing Support Assistant can’t do a diagnostic on the card reader because it doesn’t seem to exist as a hardware device anymore. It doesn’t show if I say show hidden in device manager. I am not trouble shooting it anymore. Please have a Dell support manager contact me.”

Dell Response:

I am extremely sorry for this inconvenience. Please allow me few minutes to get this reviewed with the experts. -Pratheepan.

Here is the information from the service request opened by DellCares. I am pretty sure the the numerous null entries is Dell’s way to keep their entries private, but still use the same support ticketing system as normal request. That is not very transparent if you ask me.

Almost as soon as I asked for the update, the request was closed. I made a couple more social media post about the lack of customer service from Dell.

UPDATE 2:
So, I decided it was probably in my best interest to resolve this issue before I get an ulcer or have some other stress related illness set in. For $50, I was able to upgrade my warranty be on-site after remote diagnostics. Once I could see the new warranty was in place, I made the call to Dell Support. The tech I spoke with saw the closed social media initiated ticket and re-opened it. I did not have to go through all of the diagnostics and other steps to confirm the card read was not working. He took my word for it and set me up for a visit from a repair technician, which was scheduled the next day. While my initial visit was estimated to be between 9am to 1pm, it ended up being more like a 6pm visit, but the technician either called me or sent e-mails to keep me updated throughout the day. Kudos to Curtis from Worldwide Technical Services for his efforts and installing the replacement motherboard while I bent his ear talking about forensics and computers in general. We have both paid our visits to state prisons to do tech work in our careers. Once the replacement motherboard was in and various connections remade, the first power up had me a little nervous as booting Windows failed, but that was expected as the new board needed the service tag and other information to configure the initial boot. Second time is a charm and I was prompted to login; all the drives were present and everything looked good. The final test was inserting a SD card into the internal reader… and it took a few seconds for Windows to prompt me what I wanted to do. I opened file explorer and the SD card was there and I was able to read the contents in file explorer without issue. At this point I am happy I spent the money to upgrade the warranty, but Dell should offer to compensate me in some fashion after the experience of sending the system in and the repair not being made the first time.

GiiNii Photo Frames & Memory Cards

Many years ago I bought a GiiNii GN-7002W 7″ digital photo frame from the local TigerDirect store here in Raleigh. Since that time, many things have changed including the size of memory cards and SD card formatting along with disk boot records. My wife has a little Realistic (RIP Radio Shack) frame that works with a 2GB SD card, but this GiiNii 7″ refused to load any photos off of a 4GB SD card, but would load the images off of the 2GB card. I tried several reformats and making the 4GB SD card into a 2GB through partitioning before finally finding a GiiNii manual on an 8″ frame that says the following:

This is great information, but it leaves out one very important detail. If you have formatted a SD card recently, there is a chance Windows made the boot record type GUID Partition Table (GPT) instead of the old style Master Boot Record (MBR) as GPT supports the new replacement for older BIOS firmware otherwise known as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI. So you did come here just to learn about drive boot types and firmware, or you’re probably like me and just want to get your GiiNii digital frame working with your memory card. If your card is listed above and is within the maximum capacity, I think this will help you get your card working in your frame.

Rufus to the rescue. As a full-time digital forensics analyst, I routinely use Rufus to make bootable flash drives and memory cards so I can boot suspect systems for forensic imaging or test out various new Linux operating system distributions. Rufus is touted as “The Reliable USB Formatting Utility w/ Source”. While you can tell Rufus that you want to make a bootable USB drive containing the latest version of Ubuntu or other operating system, it is a format utility like the name says. To get your memory card formatted correctly based on the information from the GiiNii manual above, download Rufus here. Then insert you memory card into your computer’s memory card reader/writer or USB port (this should work for thumb drives as well). Then start the program rufus#-##.exe (where #-## will be something like 3-10) that’s probably sitting in your downloads folder. Here is what you might see when you start Rufus (Note: you may have to be admin on your system to get Rufus working):

Now make the following changes so it will match the image below…
1. Make sure the device information represents the card or USB drive you want to format – then check it again.
2. For Boot selection, use the drop down and select Non bootable
3. For the partition scheme, use the drop down to select MBR
4. Type whatever you want in the Volume Label box
5. For the File system, select FAT32 (Default) from the drop down menu

Verify your settings match these, other than your device name, and click START.
You will be warned that you are about to destroy all off the data on the memory card or USB flash, so make sure Rufus us formatting the right memory card or USB device before you continue.
Once the formatting completes, you should be able to copy your images to the card and get your GiiNii photo frame to see them.

Part 2 The images don’t look right…
“I copied my files onto the card and the frame sees them, but the resolution is wrong and the images are super tiny or I only see a small piece of the image.” It seems GiiNii has tried to deal with this resizing issue on newer frames as the frame can be connected to your computer and the images written to the memory in the frame or the memory card slot and GiiNii resizes the images during the copy process. For people old frames from GiiNii, we are not that lucky. If you have Lightroom, the easiest way to resize the images you want on your frame is to have them in a collection or selected from within a folder. When doing the export and placing the resized images in another folder, use the resize dimensions and set the longest edge to the max resolution your frame supports. My wife’s old Radio Shack frame only did 240 and the 7″ GiiNii does 480. If you don’t have Lightroom, the easiest way using only Windows is on this site.

Hope this helps someone.

PC Hardware Updates – Dell 8930 XPS PC & Lenovo Flex 5

Buying a new computer always seems to be a daunting task, but two experiences with relatives and friends made it somewhat easier. First there was a need for a new system at the bike shop and I went down there one afternoon and offered some suggestions to replace the very old all-in-one HP. Little did I expect the owner to go with the first option I showed her which was the current best seller on Amazon for a desktop with decent specifications that shouldn’t need to be updated for a few years. I also had to consider their POS needs to run Lightspeed. Lightspeed POS is really a cloud based application with the technical issues tied more to the receipt printers and barcode scanning devices than the software itself. After that recommendation and quick purchase, the next was my father-in-law. He had been using a Dell XPS tower from 2008 up until the 2019 holidays. I guess he finally realized that it might time to upgrade from Windows Vista. Within 30 seconds of standing in front of the Dell XPS tower display at Costco, he said looks good. So, to contrast my normal experience with theirs, I usually will spend six months building a parts list on Amazon before I actually order the stuff to build a custom PC. Other than laptops, the only brand name systems I have owned were Tandy XT clone (Returned within 30 day window), and a Sony Pentium system about 15 years ago. At work I have used various IBM, Dell, and HP systems along with custom built Forensic systems from various companies like Digital Intelligence, TriTech Forensics, and most recently Silicon Forensics. I guess I like the sense of accomplishment when I build something from scratch, but there is always the risk of needing support and with home built you have to deal with each part individually where a brand name system is treated as a whole with the manufacturer.

Speaking of needing support, at the beginning of 2019 my wife needed a laptop to replace her aging HP 17″. Why you would want a laptop that big and heavy is beyond me, but she got it and quickly found it became about as portable as a desktop. The main issue we experienced with that system was the back of the screen separating from the front at the bottom near the hinges. Turns out the hinges were so tight that eventually they quit hinging and the screws on the hinges keeping the back attached to the front pull out and opening the lid makes a big split show up between the front and back of the screen. Funny thing is we were at an attorney’s office one day when he pulled out the same HP 17″ laptop and as soon as he opened it, I saw the same issue. He was working a law suit on bad battery issues in laptops and I joked he should consider a class action on the defective HP laptop hinges as we had the same problem. Moving on from the problematic HP, I was given direction to consider a Lenovo as her Dad was a Lenovo contractor at the end of his second act after retiring from IBM. Costco had a Flex 5 laptop with 16GB I7 8th Gen and SSD drive and standard hard drive. Being a Flex system it doubles a huge tablet with its 180 degree hinge and touch screen. Her model has been flawless and I needed a laptop and bought the same model in June. Sad to say, I did not have the same experience, but it all came down to one defective part – the internal microphone array. After troubleshooting the problem countless hours as it became a challenge I wasn’t willling to lose, I finally gave in called the Costco Concierge support. They did basic trouble shooting before getting me in the queue on the Lenovo support line. Lenovo went a little further with trouble shooting, but in the end they diagnosed the microphone was defective. So, on March 14th, I shipped the system to Texas and Corona hit and the estimated nine day turn around time become 37 days. That’s no fault of Lenovo as I imagine it took some doing to come up with social distancing between the technician work benches to allow them to keep working during our efforts to flatten the curve. With the laptop back as of last night, I was able to do a family Zoom meeting with no issues. A family Skype attempt had been the intial detection of the problem back during the holidays of 2019. Now that my system is on par with my wife’s computer, all is good on the Lenovo laptop front.

In building my current list, I was torn between a AMD and Intel build. My last build was a Ryzen and it’s working great running Linux with my old Linux Apache MySQL & PHP (LAMP) system virtualized with VirtualBox. The original LAMP box had a ton of tweaks and other things I did not want to replicate from scratch. So, the option to convert the physical to virtual was an easy choice. See this post on that effort. My most recent build list was leaning toward AMD Ryzen 7, but it was still running about $1800 with okay video cards and 32Gb of memory. While I did not build a list for an Intel system, from what I could see in the market place the Intel build would have been a bit more than the AMD for similar specs. One of the front runners when I started to consider systems, was the CyberPower Costco had on sale during the holidays, but it was only 32GB of memory and came in gaming tower configuration without a CD/DVD drive. I buy music CD’s from the thrift stores and need the drive to rip them into audio files. Plus, they never had them in stock and would not sell the display as the inventory computer kept saying more were on the way. I found it interesting that at some Costco locations they appear to remove the video cards from the display models, but in other stores the cards are present. I guess from an inventory loss control perspective removing the cards prevents them from being stolen, but you would have to be an insider or pretty brazen to try and take a graphics card out of a system up on a display. But I digress. I kept watching the Costco site and they posted the Dell 8930 XPS at $400 off the normal price with 64GB of memory, 9th gen intel i7 chip, and a decent Nvidia 1660 Ti 6GB graphics card. 64Gb of memory in any of my custom build lists pushed the prices much closer to $2,000. I put the system in my cart and let it languish for several days, before returning on the next to last day of the sale to make the purchase.

So far I am impressed with the build quality. Plastic on the external pieces, but mostly stamped steel on the internals. Doing forensics on PC’s for a living, I have encountered some pretty strange case configurations where the case opening mechanism was a puzzle in itself. This case did not disappoint in that area. There was a screw on the latch that had to be removed, then the latch itself does not slide, twist or pivot; but pulls away from the back of the case to release the latching mechanism. The tower itself is about the height of a power supply shorter than a full ATX tower. Interestingly enough, the difference in height is largely due to Dell positioning the power supply in the middle of the case through the use of a hinged support system. It seems to make the case a little top heavy toward the front as keeping the system on the edge of the shelf I have it on is little precarious when slid out too far. Inside the case are two additional 3.5″ hard drive (HD) caddies located on the very bottom of the case. Each caddy has two screws to hold it in place once the drive is mounted using the standard screw holes on the side of the drive to attach the caddy. For SATA cabling, a right angle on one end with straight on the other should work with a length of no more that 12-15″. I plugged in a clone of my old data drive from my previous system went right to work after using Ninite to grab my favorite software and installing my commercial packages from Adobe and Microsoft. Speaking of Microsoft licensing, I use a volume license reseller Indigo Software out of Texas for Office licenses. They are about the same or little cheaper than a subscription, but it’s one time purchase. I was a little disappointed that the Dell 8930 came with Windows Home, but a quick search on ebay for a Pro upgrade license was easy to find and did the trick to get me to Pro.

I have not really found anything to tax the system resources at this point, but eventually I will be doing some video editing. The internal SSD, which appears to be a motherboard SSD slotted Micron 2200S NVMe 512GB is decent drive and reported these results at User Benchmark
SusWrite @10s intervals: 851 1095 1296 1291 1291 1018 MB/s
For the full UserBenchmark on my actual system check out: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/25269235 The actual 2666 MHz memory installed to constitute 64GB is from SK Hynix. I have not really looked at the other hardware other than noting the internal 2TB drive a Seagate Barracuda and the built-in sound card is a standard Realtek with three connectors (Front, Surround and Sub/Center) on the rear and two 3.5mm ports on the front. The front also has a USB C Type 3.1 on and rear as well. The front panel also includes three USB ports and a SD card reader/writer. I guess the only thing that not top of line at the moment is the graphics card, but for my needs with image editing, it is more than sufficient.

I don’t know that I would call this purchase an impulse buy, but it was a definite change from the buy parts and build a system mentality I have used in the past. Windows 10 itself is a pain when it comes to first time setup. It never names my c:\Users\<folder> to be what I want and takes some registry edits and workarounds to get what I want. Why not just ask the user: This is going to be the name of your User profile folder “Tim19”, do you want to change it? YES!!! Enter new name: tim They should also detect the presence of a small SSD for the OS and larger Data drive and automatically create the default user data storage folders on the larger drive instead of making the user do a move location on all of them.

Craigslist Service Providers Beware @interviewsessions on Telegram

I recently worked an incident where a an executive’s persona was impersonated through the use of gmail account to respond to service offerings posted on Craigslist for graphic artists offering up interviews for corporate positions. Once the person who posted the service offering got the e-mail from the executive, the scammer tried to move the interview process to Telegram. This is not much different from the Job Groups people create for metro areas on Facebook and scammers try to move the interview to Google Hangouts for jobs that don’t exist. In the case of Telegram, we were provided the User ID of Telegram @interviewsessions that was associated with the person Nicolas Buquier (Pizza Hut Exec). I made abuse complaints to Google mail and Telegram with e-mail evidence of where the accounts were being used in a scam, but neither have taken any action to shut down the accounts. So, today, I decided to have some fun with scammers. Here is the log of my “interview”. I thought I was doing well from the BS I fed back, but I got tired of messing with them once they would not take my bait and review a link I provided. Clicking it would have identified their IP address or proxy service being used.

Telegram Session
Nicolas Burquier @interviewsessions

20 April 2020