While you could try to get the user to find the service tag on the device, you may be better off retrieving the service tag for the Dell system on your own.

That’s where the Dell Service Tag Lookup Tool comes into play. The program is a very basic application for Windows PCs that can lookup the service tag of any Dell machine over the local network.

Please note that this works only for devices that are connected to the network, which excludes televisions, computer monitors and other devices that do not come with network connection options.

When you start the program you see a basic form and a single button. All you need to do is to enter the computer name of the Dell machine and click on Lookup Service Tag afterwards.

The program will then connect to the other machine and retrieve that machine’s service tag for you. You can try the tool first and if it cannot retrieve the service tag, you can still ask the user or get the information by yourself.

A test over at the Virus Total site detected one hit out of 44 different antivirus engines. This is likely a false positive.

Windows users can download the Dell Service Tag Lookup Tool from the author’s site over at Danusoft. The application is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

The GPU may fail due to temperature fluctuations and users may experience symptoms like random characters or lines on the screen. The problem is that if customers experience those symptoms the Bios update will not help them anymore and they have to contact Dell support to fix the issue.

Everyone else should check the website to see if their Dell notebook is in the list and update the Bios of its GPU accordingly. The affected notebooks according to Dell are:

• Inspiron 1420
• Latitude D630
• Latitude D630c
• Dell Precision M2300
• Vostro Notebook 1310
• Vostro Notebook 1400
• Vostro Notebook 1510
• Vostro Notebook 1710
• XPS M1330
• XPS M1530

The Bios update will turn on the GPU fan more frequently at half or quarter speed to reduce temperature fluctuations. Dell confirmed once again that this will have no noticeable effect on battery life. New notebooks will be shipped with the updated Bios.

The real question however is which GPUs are affected but there does not seem to be a direct answer for this. There is however the list of Nividia GPUs that have been used in the affected Dell notebooks, here it is:

• 128MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8400M GS
• 128MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS (64 bit)
• 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS
• 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8600M GS (128 bit)
• 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT
• 128MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 135M
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M 256MB TurboCache (128MB dedicated)

My suggestion would be to check your notebook, even if it is not from Dell, to find out if a video card from the list has been used to build it. If that is the case contact the hardware manufacturer to find out how he handles the problem.