Tech Forum

RussellHltn wrote:I was replacing our stake machine last week (Another GX270 bites the dust).

Just curious. What is giving out? Hard drive? Motherboard? Memory? Or more likely, something different on each one?

Will ours hold out until next November if we have to wait that long? (I have no idea what the replacement schedule will be for next year.)

Curious minds, slightly off topic, sorry.

lajackson wrote:Just curious. What is giving out?

Bulging capacitors. Seems like we got a bad lot. Seven out of the nine original machines have succumbed. They were due for replacement next year.

The symptoms are the machine spontaneously shuts down. It may start with needing to be stared more then once to get going. You may also see something like "The last shutdown was due to a thermal event". This is a false message.

Overall I like Dell find find their stuff to be reliable. But they got a bad batch of caps in this shipment and because the machines only run once or twice a week, it took this long to turn up. It's out of warranty and even extended warranty for this problem.

RussellHltn wrote:Bulging capacitors. Seems like we got a bad lot. Seven out of the nine original machines have succumbed. They were due for replacement next year.

Well, we have not had that problem. Actually, we have not had any problem at all with our 15 machines that will be swapped out next year. One of them had a loose cable to the CD drive when they all first arrived. I snapped it back into place and that was it.

And thanks for the interesting read on capacitors.

The GX270s were bad machines. Dell sent out Maxtor hard drives that failed a lot and of course, the mentioned capacitors. The GX280s have a heat sync issue that causes the computers to operate loudly. Its a shame, they are decent machines otherwise.

Dell has fixed these issues with the GX755 models.

James_Piper wrote:The GX270s were bad machines. Dell sent out Maxtor hard drives that failed a lot and of course, the mentioned capacitors. The GX280s have a heat sync issue that causes the computers to operate loudly. Its a shame, they are decent machines otherwise.

Dell has fixed these issues with the GX755 models.

So is the Church still sending out GX270s or have they moved to GX755s or something else? Does anyone know?

James_Piper wrote:The GX270s were bad machines. Dell sent out Maxtor hard drives that failed a lot and of course, the mentioned capacitors.

Depends on the batch you got. All of mine had Seagates and I have not had one hard drive failure.

Our FHC has the GX270 mini-towers that were handed down from CHQ. They seem to be doing fine in their second life.

The GX280s have a heat sync issue that causes the computers to operate loudly. Its a shame, they are decent machines otherwise.

I've noticed that with one of the hand-me downs. Any easy fix?

Alan_Brown wrote:So is the Church still sending out GX270s or have they moved to GX755s or something else? Does anyone know?

All of our replacements so far have been the 740. Good machines, but a royal pain to load Desktop 5.5 on. Maybe it's just me but they don't like my external CD.

I finally found the easy way. Yank the hard drive and drop it into one of the FHC GX270. The loadup goes soothly there. Then when it come time to reboot, shut down and move it back to the 740.

RussellHltn wrote:All of our replacements so far have been the 740. Good machines, but a royal pain to load Desktop 5.5 on. Maybe it's just me but they don't like my external CD.

I finally found the easy way. Yank the hard drive and drop it into one of the FHC GX270. The loadup goes soothly there. Then when it come time to reboot, shut down and move it back to the 740.

I emailed HQ to request a new 5.5 as mine was damaged. They emailed back simply saying...

"You do not need to install the desktop 5.5 on Dell 740 machine. MSR Support Staff -vrr"

Led me to search the lds.org site for more instruction (since so much instruction was given by vrr.) Found instructions on setting up the 740 without Desktop 5.5. If you have an external CD, you can attempt setting up 5.5 as there is instructions for that, although that has problems too as noted above. I believe there is another thread on this topic....

aprayzr wrote:I emailed HQ to request a new 5.5 as mine was damaged.

Damaged how? I was beginning to think mine was messed up but it turned out to be the machine I was using.

aprayzr wrote:Found instructions on setting up the 740 without Desktop 5.5.

Yes, it's permissible to do it that way. At least for the 740. But I prefer using the desktop as I believe it give a more complete starting point then just loading the various apps on top of WinXP.

One thing I think you get with Desktop is the ability to do image backup and restore. Might come in handy if someone FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Repair) a computer.

RussellHltn wrote:Damaged how? I was beginning to think mine was messed up but it turned out to be the machine I was using.

I should have elaborated. My "damaged" copy was due to the CD driver problem in the 740. Led me to believe my copy was damaged as it would not recognize CD1 at the start of the process. Driver problem, not a damaged CD problem.

RussellHltn wrote:Yes, it's permissible to do it that way. At least for the 740. But I prefer using the desktop as I believe it give a more complete starting point then just loading the various apps on top of WinXP.

One thing I think you get with Desktop is the ability to do image backup and restore. Might come in handy if someone FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Repair) a computer.

Thanks for the info. I was not aware of the image backup and restore ability with the Desktop.