The Dell tech sent me an email with the news that Windows 7 doesn’t support more than 192 GB of RAM. Bummer. Should Dell have told me that before they took the order? Maybe so, but, back in the 32-bit OS days, they never said that if you ordered a 4GB machine you could only use 3GB. I’ll give them a conditional pass on that one, especially since Win 8 will support all my RAM.
I thought the black screen sounded like a software problem, specifically the driver interacting poorly with all that RAM, but Dell tech support insisted on treating it as a hardware issue. The tech had me run the BIOS-level diagnostics on the computer. It passed. We began to set up a service call for a tech to come by and swap out the display adapter for another. I asked that he bring along a V4900 in case that swap didn’t fix anything. I never got an answer on that, which was the same as saying “no”.
Whether the Dell tech’s suspicions were right or whether mine were could be resolved with the answer to a pretty simple question: did Dell test the hardware and software together before they shipped the computer? If the answer is yes, then some piece of hardware most likely got broken in shipment or failed after I powered up the computer. But if all Dell did was run a hardware test, load the software on the disk, stick the disk in the computer, and call that it, there is every reason to think that the hardware is good, since it’s been tested, and there’s a software problem that never showed up because the software was never tested on this hardware. Add to that that my configuration — a low-end card in a high end, high-memory machine — is probably unusual, so it’s possible that no one at Dell has ever tested this set of software (mostly OS and drivers) on hardware configured like mine.
While I was emailing back and forth with tech support, I got an email from my Dell account rep with a link to the current version of the NVIDIA reference driver, not tested by Dell. I downloaded it and, after several false starts, go it installed. No more black screen.
So I’m a happy camper, right? No. The display is slow. Dragging a window around the screen leaves rectangles behind and is jerky. I ran Windows Experience, and it gave the display the lowest possible rating.
I ordered an AMD V4900 from Amazon. We’ll see how it does.
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