How do I deal with or report an apparent problem with a Dell driver download script?

John-E.                                                                                     

Thanks Jesse L. And I suppose that you have answered my question so I will mark it answered. If they keep you in the loop as to if and when a problem is found and fixed I would certainly benefit if you dropped me a line here.

John,

Thanks for the feedback. This is a recurring issue our customers will encounter, particularly with legacy drivers or drivers that have a long-running version history. A few things will cause this issue, most notably an internal vs external version mismatch in the latest driver's details.

If you could list the Details link for the driver in question, I can have the product group take a look at it and see if anything is amiss in the driver's detail manifest.

We are introducing a new framework for our driver's data that should eliminate this particular issue, but it won't happen until later this year and will be largely transparent to customers.

Thanks for interest Jay W.

The details link for the problem I initially raised  is http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=H9XFP&fileId=2969964159&osCode=W764&productCode=xps-17&languageCode=EN&categoryId=CS

I am also wondering if the driver update for my Intel Wireless Driver was applied correctly since the version number and date of the driver is not updated after I run the download even though everything runs just as expected. Might this be due to the issue you describe above. Are you suggesting this might be nothing more than a documentation problem? I picked this one out myself; it was not flagged by Dell Detect. Anyway, its detail page is:

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=R307408&fileId=2731119486&osCode=W764&productCode=xps-17&languageCode=EN&categoryId=NI

Correct, the details would not change because these would likely have been the drivers you had installed already. This particular platform did not see a lot of churn in driver releases and the majority of them remained in the A00-A01 range. Not uncommon for systems of that timeframe.

Reinstalling the drivers is still helpful in addressing any sort of data integrity or corruption issues that could have occured, but if your problem persists, further troublshooting is still in order, obviously.

That having been said, I don't know if the second driver listed is correct for your system because its one of several possible configuration options. I would recommend using the Service Tag option of the Drivers & Downloads page to list all the drivers for your particular system configuration (as it was originally shipped from Dell). Then focus on any wireless/networking drivers that are listed that you have not refreshed yet.

Full disclosure, I haven't been a Dell technician for some fifteen years now, so I will defer any further troubleshooting you may need to the experts in place here in the forums or in our tech agent pools. But hopefully this clears up some of the issues with the D&D site, which I continue to endeavor to correct!

Thanks again for your Interest Jay W.

I thought I was using the service tag option. My Service Tag does appear at the top of my Drivers and Downloads page. I reentered it from the support page just to see if anything showed up different. Its all the same. But I have long been confused and a bit unnerved because the resulting list of drivers does not seem to be limited to my original configuration. That's why I was relying on the System Analysis from Dell Detect. But in order to check for myself which ones go with my original configuration I have had to fall back on comparing my configuration as specified In the Dell Support Center program running on my computer or the more obscure info under the System Configuration pull down on this D&D page (for my Service Tag) with the component descriptions on my D&D page. And that makes me nervous as it seems a rather mistake prone procedure.  Of course I may not be using the proper procedure for Service Tag option but I don't know see any other route to it. So I'm open to even the most routine suggestions.

Has the driver team responded to this. I am still having the same problem described above.

I previously mentioned that when I run the downloaded executable R286840.exe it creates an unexpected named directory dell/drivers/H9XFP. When I run the setup.exe from that directory it installs under x86. But I have an x64 system. Perhaps this is why the newer software version does not show up under Control Panel/Programs/Programs and Features. Could that be due to a logic error in the installation script?