So it seems that Dell or more so nVidea have some over heating problems with some of the gpus. My D630c had been running really hot for quite a while and the fan was going a bit nuts during windows startup until last weekend… when the system decided to put random characters onscreen and die. As with all things, the laptop booted up fine on the Tuesday when I called Dell however running the system diags did reproduce the problem. While testing further, a hard drive problem popped up so they agreed to change the disk. When I mentioned about the heat problem, I was quickly put on hold for a few minutes, then they came back and said they were replacing the motherboard and fans. A quick Google did show up a few things about the failling GPUs.

Anyway, Dell did replace everything and things are working fine since. The replacement harddisk is a bit louder than the last one but it works so I’m finally getting back to normal. It has taken nearly a week to get everything restored, mostly due to Acronis being unable to restore large files individually. It kept getting stuck about 1.8G into the large files in my laptop. Doing a full disk restore worked fine.

The other annoying issue is Windows search stops working in Outlook after installing Exchange Administrator. Easy fix however. Close Outlook, Run System32\fixmapi.exe. Open Outlook. Let the search reindex everything. You may have to open the Windows Search options, select Outlook, then hit rebuild on the index.