I think my XPS 8700 is dead. Last night I did my usual and logged on and whilst using skype and the screen began flickering. Thick horizontal lines and large pixel type patches. Screen shared with a more tech-savvy friend on skype but he couldn't see the fault. So we wondered if it was the monitor going (both the PC and monitor are just 10 months old), we also wondered if it was my graphics card. I went through and updated all my drivers and restarted the PC - during this process the PC crashed twice. First with a grey and black vertical stripe screen, then with a blank dark grey screen, the sound from skype also died with the blank screens.
The problem became worse, I ruled out the monitor being the problem by swapping it with one from my old PC. I deleted the video files that were taking up about 100GB and so there's plenty of memory. It wouldnt let me do a PC refresh after the first creash due to lack of memory on the system drive.
When I last tried to log onto the PC (I hoped to back up what files there were onto a pendrive) but I couldn't get it to show me the log on screen before it defaults to a bright blue screen.
I called Dell Tech support who want to take me through troubleshooting tonight. However I wondered what they would do under the terms of my warranty. I use the PC for work as well as personal use and need it back up and running asap. My old PC also XPS but about 8 years old now wont do what i need it to for work.
Are Dell likely to replace the whole thing or fix it and send it back? How long is it likely to take and does anyone have a clue what went wrong?
