After our PC rollout in February we were aware of an intermittent issue which left a few people with sound dropping on their machines. This was only affecting a small number of people using the newer Dell OptiPlex 7040 desktops which we are currently deploying. This was fixed by us through updating the Realtek Audio driver on machines where the problem had been identified. Whilst this solved the initial problem we were also aware of a few reports of the same model machines crashing and experiencing the ‘blue screen of death’.
Investigations identified that this crashing was happening after the machines had been left locked and the screen had turned off. When subsequently unlocking the machine it then crashed and restarted. Further testing and tracking of the problem showed that this was only happening on machines where we had applied an updated audio driver to resolve the original issue sound dropping out.
Since then we’ve spent a large amount of time reviewing and testing an updated set of drivers that Dell have made available for this model of machine. We now have an updated pair of audio and video drivers which we plan to deploy to all of our 7040 machines (over 500). This ensures that we fully resolve both the problems on all machines and enables us to maintain a consistent build across all machines.
We plan to roll out the update automatically on Thursday 6th April. The process will be fully automated with no input required from you, however it may cause the screen to ‘blank’ for 3-4 seconds whilst the video driver is updated. Due to this we have emailed staff using these machines to make them aware.
Any machine which is not turned on at the time the update is deployed will receive it automatically next time it is turned on.