My Dell XPS 600 Problem
Woke up this morning only to discover that my Dell XPS 600 wouldn’t boot up. Among its symptoms, the fans were being very loud (much faster RPM than I’ve ever seen them), no signal was getting to the monitor, diagnostic light #4 was lit up, and the power button gave off a steady orange glow.
After doing some troubleshooting of my own, I took the issue to the Dell Community Support Forums where we decided I either have a motherboard failure, or power supply failure (Power Supply is an NPS-650AB D for reference). This diagnostic saved me $40 later when Dell tried to sell me some time consuming diagnostic of there own which involved them sending someone to my house to tell me what their users would tell me for free.
To make up for the savings, they did a really nice job of ripping me off with that $290 price tag on a replacement motherboard. That’s right: $290. You’d think they’re selling me some new High End Memory or a Processor for that ridiculous amount.
Anyways, just a word of advice to you XPS 600 owners: Buy the warranty if yours is about to expire. I was only able to find 3 or 4 other cases of this problem, ALL of which happened in the past 2 months.
I smell crappy hardware.