- Sep 25, 2018
- 2
- 0
- 10
My little brother bought a Dell G3 15 gaming laptop recently. It worked great for first day but then stopped connecting to most multiplayer games the next day. The exception, oddly enough, was Fortnite. It became troubleshooting hell for me (the only tech enthusiast in the house) however small the problem seemed. The game that was particularly problematic was Roblox, which works on every other device in the house. Three of us can normally play games simultaneously with no lag, so slow internet is out of the question.
We tried:
Using ethernet instead of WiFi
Restarting
Checking if the WiFi card was seated
Updating every driver
Reinstalling all of the games that weren't working
Letting every game through the firewall Bluestacks TextNow VPN
And more stuff that I probably forgot about.
This quickly became a multiple day endeavor, with no end in sight. But there was something odd that we found, a bunch of batch files left by Dell that I still don't know the function of. <Insert picture here>
At this point I was stumped and we called Dell's tech support. They immediately said it was a software issue and it would cost $250 for a top up warranty. But the guy offered that we could return it and buy it again with the warranty and it would be cheaper then. I thought that was weird because my Asus laptop had an issue with Windows and they fixed it no questions asked. But my brother wanted to think about it so I asked the guy if we could call back and get the same offer. He said no, because he was technically not allowed to do this. Shortly after this we were abruptly disconnected. Hmm...
We troubleshooted some more but ended up calling Microsoft. Before being disconnected there too the guy helped us narrow it down to ports. If some ports were closed certain games would cease to connect. We tried a VPN and now it works like a charm. So who is blocking the ports?
I had my suspicions about Dell at this point. But it worked so I didn't think much more about it.
Then, today, I saw this error message about a "missing registry value" with Dell SupportAssist. I don't mean to accuse Dell of anything, but this sort of reasoning makes sense in my mind:
If Dell blocked the ports that game normally used, on a gaming laptop, most people would just contact tech support. Most people wouldn't have bought their "software coverage" so they'd have to pay $250 to get it fixed. They couldn't play games on their gaming laptop if they didn't pay the $250, so some people would. They would be paying for Dell to "fix" what they messed up in the first place, so they could get quite a bit of money out of people.
Again, I don't have enough evidence to support this. Is there something else we could try? While VPNs work at the moment it would be nice if he could play games without a VPN.
We tried:
Using ethernet instead of WiFi
Restarting
Checking if the WiFi card was seated
Updating every driver
Reinstalling all of the games that weren't working
Letting every game through the firewall Bluestacks TextNow VPN
And more stuff that I probably forgot about.
This quickly became a multiple day endeavor, with no end in sight. But there was something odd that we found, a bunch of batch files left by Dell that I still don't know the function of. <Insert picture here>
At this point I was stumped and we called Dell's tech support. They immediately said it was a software issue and it would cost $250 for a top up warranty. But the guy offered that we could return it and buy it again with the warranty and it would be cheaper then. I thought that was weird because my Asus laptop had an issue with Windows and they fixed it no questions asked. But my brother wanted to think about it so I asked the guy if we could call back and get the same offer. He said no, because he was technically not allowed to do this. Shortly after this we were abruptly disconnected. Hmm...
We troubleshooted some more but ended up calling Microsoft. Before being disconnected there too the guy helped us narrow it down to ports. If some ports were closed certain games would cease to connect. We tried a VPN and now it works like a charm. So who is blocking the ports?
I had my suspicions about Dell at this point. But it worked so I didn't think much more about it.
Then, today, I saw this error message about a "missing registry value" with Dell SupportAssist. I don't mean to accuse Dell of anything, but this sort of reasoning makes sense in my mind:
If Dell blocked the ports that game normally used, on a gaming laptop, most people would just contact tech support. Most people wouldn't have bought their "software coverage" so they'd have to pay $250 to get it fixed. They couldn't play games on their gaming laptop if they didn't pay the $250, so some people would. They would be paying for Dell to "fix" what they messed up in the first place, so they could get quite a bit of money out of people.
Again, I don't have enough evidence to support this. Is there something else we could try? While VPNs work at the moment it would be nice if he could play games without a VPN.
Facebook
Twitter