Customer asked me to install a new PC (Dell inspiron 530s), and to transfer files from her old PC.

It seems like a reasonable system (3GB ram, vista home premium, core 2 duo, etc)

Once I connect everything, I fire it up, and I notice the CPU (or PSU) fan are very noisy (running at full speed). I would expect the fan to go quiet after a few seconds.

Anyway, I decide to worry about it last, as I have a lot of configuration to do (remove norton, and some other junk, and then install/configure antivir, defender, spyware blaster, winpatrol, bhodemon, office, etc).

I also don’t have a crosover ethernet cable with me… So I’m reduced to copying about 15Gb of music files using my 1GB usb drive… painfully time consuming!

I then run out of time, so I ask Andrew to track down the solution to the noisy fan.

I suspect its a bios problem, or a faulty motherboard/fan

Andrew downloads and installs an updated bios ( http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19675114-Dell-530s-very-noisy )

And now, the PC is very quiet.

I wonder why Dell would ship PCs with a such an obvious software fault?

Many users would struggle to fix this type of problem.