Service Tag should know what hardware is installed

February 26, 2007

Posted By:  dialsoft

38 Votes

Status: Archived

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Hiya,

I am a service provider who services dozens of Dell Machines a month and often I am put in a situation where the operating system must be reinstalled. When I do this I find it great that Dell has an awesome driver selection for the machines on their website often second to none. The issue I have is that suppose I have a wireless ethernet capability in the machine, why does the service tag selection show 8 choices for the wireless card? Cant it know what was shipped with the machine? Its not that often that a laptops wireless card is changed. Also the wireless card hardware is not often identifiable as well by sight. it would be great that if the service tag selection could actually indicate what was shipped in the machine in the driver list section.

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  • Mar 1, 2007     Comment Link

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    Posted By: jhill25570

    I agree. I re-installed my dell system, and I could not get the sound to work. I called the Dell Tech Support. The tech support did not know which sound driver to use. There was no way to find out which device was on my computer. So he told me to try some of the drivers listed on the Dell site. I tried some, and one of the drivers worked. The sound problem was fix.
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  • Mar 1, 2007     Comment Link

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    Posted By: mazemaster

    While your idea should work fine, I think they do know exactly what is in each machine. I contact them at least weekly for repairs of my company's 150+ computers. When they send rerplacement parts, they rarely send the wrong part and they never have to ask what exactly is in the machine.
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  • Feb 27, 2007     Comment Link

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    Posted By: ftmgal

    100% agree but having been involved in some manufacturing, I can see where Dell might not know what is in a specific machine. But I believe there is a simple solution. Write a software program that does an inventory and creates a specific tag for the machine. This tag is then sent to the driver server which then lists the specific drivers for that machine. The program probably needs to be small and self booting as the diagnostics are so that it can be run on a machine with no OS yet. The output needs to be a compact code that is easily typed into another machine that is connected to the Internet and so the driver server. Probably needs a checksum to eliminate typos.

    Another advantage of this type of identification is that I can change the hardware in the box and still get the right drivers. If the program can't identify the hardware because it was never sold by Dell, the tag will identify as unknown and the driver list will say the same. The program is constantly updated (maybe with a seperate table) but always backward compatible in creating a tag.
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  • Feb 27, 2007     Comment Link

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    Posted By: mazemaster

    I'm with you. It is rediculous that I type in my service tag and still have to guess which wireless driver or video driver I need. Dell sold the computer, so they know what's in it. How hard could it be to provide us with the information?
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  • Feb 27, 2007     Comment Link

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    Posted By: dialsoft

    I thought more people would respond to this one for sure!
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  • Feb 26, 2007     Comment Link

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    Posted By: wangvs

    We've had this problem, too. The Dell page for the service tag # listed several items of audio hardware with no way whatsoever to tell what was actually installed or built into the Dell PC. Thus downloading a driver was entirely a process of trial and error.