Dell XPS 13 9360 Hardware Reset

TL;DR – If you are having some spontaneous errors start your laptop try disconnecting your batteries for an hour, and try again.

XPS 13 9360

Got a new laptop last month, it was time to replace the old one. Did some searching online and found something light, powerful, and at a good price. Dell XPS 13 9360:

•  8th Gen Intel® Core i7-8550U  (*Quad Core*)
• 512GB PCIe Solid Drive Drive (*NVMe Drive*)
• 16GB LPDDR3 1866MHz RAM
• 1x Thunderbolt port
• 13.3″ Touchscreen InfinityEdge QHD+ (3200 x 1800) Display

On sale at Costco for $1400. Overall a good value for a quad core laptop with NVMe.

The Break

Came back from a meeting (Starbucks? :)) Friday and the machine failed to boot. Got some display errors, rebooted, but got the recovery screen. So I shutdown for a while, when I rebooted, nothing. No Screen nothing.

However I did notice that the LED on the front was blinking, and I was able to catch the pattern, 2 and 7. Looking up in the service manual:

LCD Error!?!?! Crap.

A call to Dell Support confirmed the error, and a RMA ticket was generated, it could be two weeks before I get it back.

Battery

I wanted to archive the contents of the Disk before I sent it off to dell, so I got out my Torx screw driver.

But while I had the case open I disconnected the main Battery and the CMOS battery.

With most modern PC’s each of the components have small computers built in them. If they develop errors, do they reboot like the main OS when the power is off? If the battery is always connected that might not be true.  I had a similar problems recently with my SuperMicro test box, where flashing the BIOS wasn’t helping to resolve a complex problem I had with the box. Draining the CMOS battery and re-flashing the BIOS did work!

After an hour, I plugged in the batteries, and tried booting again. Yea, the machine works! It’s alive! I don’t have to send my machine in for repair.

Hopefully the machine will work a little bit longer than 45 days. We’ll know soon.

 

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