Dell Inspiron 17-7737 Troubleshooting

The device has been or is experiencing crashes in the form of a Blue Screen of Death.

In common occurrences, BSODs could be as simple as your memory suffering from an unexpected event, with that, the computer might resort to a BSOD to prevent any damage. Your memory just needs a restart of the computer.

Do note that when restarting to clear your memory, you must fully "Shut Down" your computer and power it back on. This allows your computer to fully cleanse the memory and give the computer the restart it needs to get back to functioning

In more cases than expected, a BSOD can be triggered by peripherals (keyboard, mouse, headphones) having a bad interaction with your device in the same way that memory can. Try removing or unplugging any non-essential peripherals from your device while it is powered off and try booting back up.

If you notice that your BSOD has stopped occurring, you can try plugging the peripherals back in, and try pinning one that could be causing a BSOD. If one is found, try to uninstall any driver software for said peripheral and see if that was the trigger of the BSOD.

In the most drastic of cases, one of two things can be the culprit of a BSOD, your Windows operating system, or some hardware in your device. To see if it is the operator, we must reinstall it.

You can have Windows perform a reinstallation of itself on your device at the cost of some of the data in the hard drive with Windows on it, which can always be backed up to things like:

• Thumb Drive
• Cloud Storage
• Portable HDD

Once you have important files backed up, we can now get to the steps to reinstall Windows. Firstly, the default version of Windows on this machine, Windows 8.1.

• Head to the start menu by pressing the Windows key
• Bring your mouse to the lower right corner and bring up the "Charms" bar
• Click the settings button, and then click "Change PC Settings"
• Go to Update and Recovery, then click Recovery.
• Click Refresh your PC without affecting your files, and then tap Get Started.

If you have updated your machine to Windows 10, you can reinstall Windows by:

• Pressing the search button on your taskbar
• Searching for "Reset", and click "Reset this PC"
• Click Get Started and select Keep your Files

After reinstalling Windows, try and see if your BSOD reoccurs, if so, the problem must be hardware.

If none of the other methods worked out for you, then your memory is faulty and needs replacing. Follow our Dell Inspiron 17-7737 Memory Replacement Guide for instructions on this.

The device is not showing any signs of power in terms of display or lights anywhere on the machine.

The first thing to check is if the components of the charger are plugged in correctly. Make sure that:

• The cord is properly connected to the wall outlet
• The cord is properly connected to the adapter brick
• The charging probe is fully connected to the charging port

If all of these check out, something is going awry on the internals.

There isn't a vast amount of ways to check the condition of the charger if you don't have any devices that fit the same exact type of charger, being a 7.4mm headed 65W AC charger adapter. If you do though, see if the charger can charge the device, if it can, the first device has a battery issue, if not, the charger isn't functioning properly.

In the case that your charger is not faulty, your battery is the culprit. Refer to our Dell Inspiron 17-7737 Battery Replacement Guide for information on how to replace the battery.

The keyboard is not reading keystrokes or experiencing issues while functioning.

Test your key switch to see if it is physically moving down on a regular press. If not, try using any thin and rigid tool to pop the keycap off of the key. Use canned air to blow out any crumbs or grime that could be influencing your keys.

In a similar fashion as the last section, grime, and crumbs could be making your key switch sticky, therefore inhibiting the function of the keyboard. Cleaning it out can be a solution to such issues.

If neither of the approaches assists you in regard to your keyboard's functions, the keyboard's PCB is faulty and needs repairing.

The hard drive disk is underperforming and failing to operate normally.

Your hard drive is suffering and bottlenecking due to a lack of storage. Take a look at your file explorer under the "This PC" section and check out how much free space your disk has. Depending on the amount of open space, it'd be a good idea to give the drive some breathing room.

If the drive is still acting sluggish after some space is freed up, you need to defragment your drive. This is done through the Disk Management application of Windows, where the app breaks down the storage and tries to optimize the drive to the best of its ability. You can boot this app by:

• Go to your Windows search bar and search "defrag" and click the "Defragment and optimize drives" app.
• Click on the HDD, and click optimize

If neither of these approaches yielded anything worth mentioning, then it is probably time to get a new hard drive installed. Follow our Dell Inspiron 17-7737 Hard Disk Drive Replacement Guide for instructions to get your drive back in working order.

The disk drive isn't recognizing any disks when inserting one.

In some instances, the disk that you're trying to read isn't in working condition, if any other disk drives are available, it's a step towards solving the issue to test that they are being read.

If your disk drive isn't reading any disks at all, it is faulty, and the best you can do is replace the whole drive.