Here’s what I take from my week-long effort to get the T7600 working.
Dell shipped a combination of hardware and software that couldn’t possibly work together. I don’t think they should allow you to configure those combinations when you order a system. I’m sure it wasn’t deliberate. They didn’t know the NVIDIA card and the installed driver wouldn’t work with rest of the hardware and software. Should they have? I think so.
Dell didn’t test the hardware and software together before they shipped the system. The symptoms weren’t subtle. Logging on to Windows produced a black screen. Should they test the complete system before they ship it? I think so.
Dell’s latest approved driver for the display adapter they shipped was more than a year old. There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that they had found problems with all the NVIDIA driver releases after the one they approved. That doesn’t square with their later recommendation to use the NVIDIA reference driver, but that could have been a case of one part of the organization not knowing what another part of the organization knew, especially since the recommendation didn’t come from tech support, but from my account rep. A second, and, in my mind, more likely, explanation is that they never bothered to test any drivers later than the year-old one that shipped with the system.
Dell tech support never wanted to treat this issue as a case of incompatible components in the system they shipped. They first approached it as a hardware problem. When the system passed all the diagnostics, they still asked me to remove and reseat the display adapter, and wanted to swap in another display adapter of the same model. The only thing that kept that from happening was the tech’s insistence that I say I thought I had a defective display adapter, which I refused to do. I asked that, if they sent a tech out to swap out the display adapter, they tell him to bring along an AMD adapter to see if a) it fixed the problem, and b) it meant that the problem was compatibility. They wouldn’t do that. They also reinstalled the same display driver that shipped with the system, and talked about reinstalling the OS from scratch.
If I hadn’t taken the initiative to buy and install the AMD display adapter, my computer would still be broken.
When I offered to ship the NVIDIA display adapter back to Dell so they could test it with a similarly configured computer and see how it got through manufacturing test and isolate the compatibility issue, they were completely uninterested. In the absence of any testing I think that the next person that orders a similar system will have similar problems.
I will continue to buy from Dell. This is the first time they have ever shipped me a system that was broken in the way it was designed. It was an unusual system, and I don’t expect the same thing to happen again soon with my future orders. Still, I am disappointed.
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