You wouldn't believe the trouble I've had with my Dell laptop. I finally managed to install Windows onto it. The trouble I had with it is that the graphics card (Intel Mobile 945GM) is pretty good, except Dell isn't. Dell seem to have some obsession with annoying the living piss out of people and because of that, this 'pretty good' chipset has somehow managed to be turned into a nightmare.

What I'm talking about is how Dell built the Latitude D620 (my laptop). They did something VERY wrong and for some odd reason, Windows will NOT install on it. You must use the original Dell discs or else you're boned. I do not have the Dell discs but I assumed that it would be fine, you can install XP or Vista and just install the drivers.

WRONG! Unfortunately this is where Dell screwed up. Basically when the Windows XP install gets to installing drivers, it will install either the basic 'Unknown GPU' drivers or the normal Intel ones (I don't know and don't rightly care), and then it initializes the drivers and... PING!!! Blank screen. It's gone. Everything. The entire system freezes and the only thing you can do is start over.

Of course, this is XP and it's seven years old now so of course it will have trouble with newish hardware. So I decide, I'll put Vista on there. That should support my stuff. Wrong again. You put the Vista disc in, it says 'Windows Is Loading...", then shows the little green progress bar and... BAM!!! Blue screen of death. It's gone. Again. But it's not a graphics card issue, no it's 'MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION'. What? Machine check? How can you have a blue screen on the Vista install?

I knew neither of my discs were faulty and after ALOT of digging I found out the graphics card is at fault. So I thought, I wonder if I install Windows Vista in safe mode?

I tried that. Success!!! At least that's what I thought. It went and installed to the drive, and did the first boot, but BSOD about the MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION again. So, I was thinking, boot in safe mode to finish the install, but it comes up saying install cannot be run in safe mode.

I was getting close to hitting the thing. I email Dell asking what to do, and they say a reply is to be expected within 1 working day. Seven days later and I'm still waiting for a reply. So I decided, time to take matters into my own hands. I tried something original and heres what I did...

1. Take the drive out of my Dell and put it in a system as similar as possible, but not a Dell laptop. The only thing I had: my Intel File Server box!
2. Mangle up my Intel File Server and put the Dell drive in it.
3. Start Windows Vista install on the Intel Server onto the Dell drive
4. Finish the install
5. Take the hard drive out and put it back into the Dell.
6. See a BSOD going on about MACHINE_CHECK...
7. Reboot into safe-mode and Hooray! Finally something! I finally had success. It had nothing usable being safe mode, but it was a working system, nevertheless.
8. Open the Services thing in the Administrative Tools.
9. Set all the services except the active ones to manual start.
10. Reboot and YES! Windows Vista booting in normal mode on the Dell.
11. Open Services again.
12. Set all the services I disabled to run in 'Automatic (Delayed)' mode.
13. Reboot and everything worked.

The worst ever Windows installation. It works fine and I'm actually writing this on the Dell Latitude, so I'm happy.

If anyone else has had problems with the same laptop then this way works great! I haven't tried it with XP, but I'd say doing the same thing might work with the Intel GPU drivers installed!

Hope you will ghost your Dell with Norton Ghost or Acronis. God damn lol...

Yeah. I did. I had so much trouble with it I don't intend to have to go through that again!

MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION is not a light error. It means that you faulty hardware. This exception occurs whenever the CPU finds and reports a fault. I had this error recently due to a faulty SATA DVDRW, so run a full check on your system, and if needed throw it back at Dell.

The problem is though that once I disabled all the services then turned them on again in 'Automatic (Delayed Start)', it works fine. It's slow but fine and that's explained by the ridiculously low amount of RAM in the computer and the insanely high requirements of Vista. I haven't had any blue screens since then.

I read on Wikipedia:

Normal causes for MCE errors are overheating and/or incorrect hardware installation. Overheating can cause electrons to become more animated and thus escape from the silicon tracks, resulting in corrupted data. Some specific manually induced causes could be:

• Overclocking (naturally increases heat output)
• Poorly fitted heatsink/computer fans (the same problem can happen with excessive dust in the CPU fan)

Computer software can also cause errors in this way (normally by corrupting data they are reading or writing). For example:

• Software performing read or write operations to non-existent memory regions which leads to confusion for the processor and/or the system bus.

The are all good ideas but:

• I am not overclocking because I've had bad experiences with it in the past plus I don't think you can on this laptop.

• The heatsink is mounted fine. I installed SpeedFan a while ago (because I have a list of software I put on everything) and have seen it get up to about 65 degC and then it will turn the fan on and go back down again to about 45 degC. The fan is clean and so is the heatsink. I did a full clean-up on the system when trying to get it going to see if something was loose. It's perfectly clean.

Most likely thing is software. For the fact Kalyways Mac OS X 10.4.10 works (with certain hardware not because of lack of drivers), Kubuntu Linux, Ubuntu, Windows 98, BartPE and probably more work perfectly.

New problem: I have a Core Duo CPU and it's not registering as being dual-core. When I had Mac OS X on it, it would register fine, but in Vista there's no such luck.

I have attached a screenshot to show you what I mean.

NOTE: I have checked the BIOS and the Multi-Core mode is enabled.

I decided to follow your advice and tried replacing components. I changed the memory and that didn't help. I then tried replacing the CPU with a 1.6GHz Celeron and it's done wonders and blunders. It fixed the error up but OMG it's slow!!! I'm gonna try reinstalling Windows Vista or try Windows XP on it now that I fixed that part. Obviously the core was damaged. Thanks again Intel for failing me! That's why I'm proud of my AMD desktop and rarely touch my Intel fileserver.

I'd also say the dual-core issue would've been related. Never thought of the CPU before...

Oh well. Thank's guys for you help.

I feel your pain I've not had so many problems with Dells im never touching them again! I've got a dell monitor (it was free) and a hansan one, the dell is always 20 seconds behind the other to switch on or detect changes.

I've got a PBell desktop now and they're not much better - they used good components in the build and then stuck in a 110w power supply that could barley manager one drive and one DVD drive... but it's nothing to the nightmare I had with Dells a few years back (one such incident saw half the components melting).

on your CPU issue: try updating the BIOS ware, I had a similar problem on an older PC, I'm actually having the reverse problem on my mac: if I boot it with all 4 cores it's unstable and the internet breaks down, if I boot it with one it's all fine but I haven't got the power anymore...

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/...n&TabIndex=

see this page, download the bios update first, then update it, then any other updates you see fit... then try that dual core again...

once you are booted up into windows with the dual core press the windows key + R (run dialogue) then type "msconfig" and once that pops up, go to the boot tab, then click advanced options, and on the top left there is an options "number of processors" check that box, and select 2, and try rebooting... see if that helps...

I said in my previous comment, it's over. NO MORE POSTS ON THIS TOPIC. IT WAS THE CPU!!!