When I purchased my Quad Core XPS-720, I was excited to be able to purchase a major vendor's system with over clocking built into the default BIOS. Unfortunately, the promise has never been fulfilled. The system has locked up regularly since I purchased it and Dell's only support response: reinstall the OS. Given the amount of work and uncertainty of the fix I never did. Since Dell has released the XPS 730 and failed to certify the XPS 720 for Windows 7, I suspect that a hardware design issue may be causing the lockups, but given my options (this system was too expensive to dump after 2 years) I have decided install a clean copy of Windows 7 64 bit to see what happens.
I used my Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate upgrade DVD and installed using the fresh copy installation option (vs. the in place upgrade). This allows me to dual boot my machine (Vista or 7) in case something goes horribly wrong. The down side is that I have to recreate my environment.
The installation went fine and all the hardware drivers were detected found. The only issue was the failure of a critical Windows Update patch for the NVidia GeForce 8800 GT video card. Since, I could not find a valid Dell Windows 7 driver for the video card; I decided to try the Vista 64 bit driver. This driver solved the issue and actually provided more control panel functionality than the one found by the installation. I now need to install the NVidia RAID drivers to add the disk management functionality to the NVidia control panel.
I have started the application reinstallation process with Office 2007 Ultimate and SQL Server 2005 with all associated Service Packs. So far so good; I will add applications day by day and update this blog. I will start testing over clocking today by setting the processor to 3.2GHZ.
How ya doing! I inherited a Dell XPS 720, and am in the process of upgrading it's memory in anticipation of switching to Win 7 64-Bit.
I wish you luck, though I've had no problems thus far.
I'm adding a second 750 gig Seagate Barracuda, and am at a loss as to which file system to choose. I tend to think fat 32, but what should I use.
I realize this is a newbie question, but what does windows 7 64-Bit prefer?
The word on the street is that the 720s work great in windows 7 64-Bit, but I'm having trouble fuguring it out.
I've never used a RAID before, but Seagate's Disk wizard popped right up and identified the drive as a RAID with unallocated space....
Man I'd like to see this sucker overclocked running Win 7 64-Bit!
Any ideas, please e-mail me...I've already had to rebuild the enire system manually as a Vista machine, and boy was that 3 months of fun! :-)
Posted by: lordbronco | March 06, 2010 at 04:20 AM
I am loving Win 7 64 bit on the XPS 720. So far it has been rock solid.
You should use NTFS, this is the native file system for Win 7. I did have to use the Dell Vista 64 bit NVidia video drivers, and the Creative 64 bit audio drivers.
Dell uses the NVIDIA RAID driver which is controlled in the BIOS under the drive options. Once you turn it on, a utility will pop up during boot where you can choose RAID 0 or 1 and which drives you want to associate.
I am currently overclocked to 3.2GHZ using the settings in the BIOS.
Posted by: Stephen Skarlatos | March 06, 2010 at 08:07 AM
You have lots of testing lined up! hehehe!
I am also doing my personal test on Windows 7 Ultimate, I need to be sure that my home office will be at least 95% up and running when I shift up to 7.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Posted by: Jaydee | April 02, 2010 at 09:48 AM
Hello,
I am actually desperatly for 10 days to install windows 7 64 on my xps720, that never seams to work fine anyway.
I installed the nvidia raid driver during the windows 7 installation.
En dresult, blue screen on blue, framework violation and driver conflict seams to be.
I have a lot of audio software and hardware plug to it... But it seams clearly that it comes form the raid drivers.
Please, could you describe your installation process in detail ?
It is just my 5 blue screen in one hour....
Thanks a lot.
Posted by: Turtlesbeach | April 23, 2010 at 07:30 PM
I forgot to mentionn that i of course installed the latest nvidia video and motherboard driver, without any problems.
If you have any idea how to solve this problem, you are welcom.
Thanks.
Posted by: Turtlesbeach | April 23, 2010 at 07:33 PM
Turtlebeach,
Sorry for the delay, I do not have the NVIDIA RAID drivers installed, I could not find a compatible version but you don't need them since the RAID services are handled by the BIOS.
The only advantage of having them is being able to manage RAID from inside Win 7, but I have never found that I needed to do that.
Are you with Turtlebeach Audio, I had an Audiotron, it was a beautiful well design and crafted product. Too bad it did not make it.
Posted by: Stephen Skarlatos | April 27, 2010 at 04:39 PM
I wish to have an XPS... :) really like its design and power.
Posted by: gamboa | May 06, 2010 at 09:17 AM
I had the same issues. I reinstalled the OS and it actually worked though.
Posted by: Tony | August 04, 2010 at 11:28 AM
I would have to purchase Quad Core XPS-720 as well. Actually I heard this Quad Core XPS-720 from my friend and I am very much excited to have one as soon as possible. I am so much interested to install the latest NVIDIA. I am glad that I found this article in your site. In fact, I had a hard time finding a web which could inform me regarding this article. I would have to know if how I would be able to purchase this product.
Posted by: yamaha ez-200 | February 13, 2011 at 10:27 PM