I bought this Dell Inspiron 7000 2-in-1 last year. Along with the 4 year extended warranty. Very nice, very excited about the whole thing :-)
I went on a trip over New Years and took the tablet with me. I only needed to use it once, though, so it mostly stayed in my bag.
Then I got home, hooked it all back up, and BRRRRAAAAAHHHHHHH! The fan was super loud, sounding like a drone in my office!
I did the usual steps, turned it off and vacuumed the vents and then used a compressed air can to blow it out and vacuum again. But that didn't help.
With the extended warranty, I went to Dell. The first thing it recommended was running software updates to make sure it's not a software issue. So I checked for updates, and one of them is a BIOS update... scary, but it's from Dell so I trust it. I install it, the computer goes to restart, and... all Hades breaks loose.
First, the fan problem wasn't fixed. But worse, it wouldn't boot Windows at all! I forget exactly what it was doing, but I figured out how to get to Dell Assist (in a DOS emulator kind of area before it boots Windows) and restored to December 16, 2020. Doing that would get it in to Windows, but there was no Start button or clock, and the cursor would run continuously (implying that something was constantly running).
From there I called Dell. The tech remote accessed my computer and went through everything he could think of, but after about 2 hours he gave up. All he could recommend was a fresh Windows install!
So we hung up and I turned off the computer to keep it from running constantly. About 2 hours later I turn it on to try something, and now... it won't boot at all! It goes through the Dell logo, then gives a BSOD and reboots. Over and over and over.
I ordered a Sandisk 256G USB drive so that I could back things up:
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It came in today, then I went back to the DOS-ish Dell Assist to run a backup. There's 178.95G of data to back up. The fan is still super loud, but I have it on an external laptop fan so it shouldn't overheat or anything... it's just loud.
As of now it's been running for about 10 hours, and hasn't moved in the last 9 hours! It's copied just under 1G of the 180G and says that there's 117 hours remaining :-O
I can move the mouse around so I don't think that the SSD or CPU are frozen, but I can't get it to scroll through the textarea or anything.
I have a Cancel button, but that scares me. I have no other backups, so if I mess something up then I could potentially lose a LOT of data!
What do you all think? Let it keep running for 5 days and see what happens? Click Cancel and risk corrupting data, then try it again and hope for the best?
Throw the whole dang thing out of a window?
