New BIOS for M4500

Alright, guys (this is directed at havoctex, in particular):

Are we going to get a new BIOS for the M4500 at some point? I mean, one that can actually be installed? Oh, and that fixes at least some of the most pressing of the multitude of BIOS issues this machine has? Things like excruciatingly slow POST, sleep/hibernate issues, non-functioning ExpressCards, boot priority issues when multiple USB devices are attached? Come on, now, this is supposed to be a professional machine, not a gaming toy, which cost premium dollars. I think we can expect some real support for that...

 

Yes please, since we've discussed this post time thing, it's become even more annoying

I know you have had problems with a minicard SSD Pirx, does anybody else use a momentus XT and have any bizzare random NTLDR missing problems relating to the use, removal, installation of secondary hard drives and dvd drives, bios changes, disk defragmenting.
Mine may be just a case of a faulty nand controller or something in the drive itself, but seems to be most oddly related to whether something is or isn't in the modular bay despite the fact it's not being booted from.

 

Bumpie....

 

Ok I just switched from the legacy mode to UEFI on the M4500 thinking something along the lines of
"well my bios is slow and maybe if I used UEFI it will be faster because IBM makes a UEFI system that boots in 10 seconds" YouTube - Windows 7 boot in 10 seconds (Instant Boot by Phoenix)

So anyways I reinstall and now it waits literally an extra 12 seconds AFTER the dell splash in addition to the 10 seconds BEFORE the dell splash. Windows itself boots in 25 seconds from "loading windows" to gmail (SSD FTW). My bios takes as long as my OS to boot, thats really not cool.

Also hibernation no longer works, error 0xc000000d every time. I even had a weirder glitch where my computer wouldnt remember anything i did after a reboot. Every setting and file went back to the way it was after resetting, kind of like the movie ground hogs day. I fixed this by disabling hibernation completely. (Not just saying don't hibernate ever).

I'm talking to Dell about this right now because I really need hibernate, but trust me every bios issue you can think of is 20x worse in UEFI mode right now. Oh also in UEFI mode the laptop waits that 12 seconds after the dell splash screen in order to enter the one time boot menu, or really anything. So its not Windows thats stalling on this one.

Does anyone else here use UEFI? Maybe have some sort of magical fix for it?

EDIT: I'll let you guys know how the support case goes, and the UEFI stuff happens in the E6510s as well (They're practically the same laptops). I'm also looking for any BIOS tricks you might have figured out to make it not suck as much.

 

That fast booting Lenovo firmware is made by Phoenix for Lenovo isn't it?.
Dell have used Phoenix Bios's at various times on a few different models, I seem to remember them changing to phoenix bios from their own on a couple of models also, hopefully they've employed them to write a decent M4500 rom but in all probability they're now more interested in the M4600 replacement and some other idiotic novelty feature like Precision on.

My NTLDR-missing problems seem to be fixed with updating the firmware to S24 on the Seagate XT, according to the sellers, Dell and Mac are the two most common complaint area's with this hard drive, but that may have just been convenient for them to say at the time.

Haven't used UEFI sorry.

 

Your right about the Phoenix systems doing that for IBM as well as Dell... I'm really frustrated with the M4500's rom right now, ESPECIALLY for UEFI. Also worthy of note is that Microsoft apparently is looking to make UEFI standard for Windows 8... which hopefully means its a bit more incentivized to have a proper ROM that supports it.

 

Would you say this is a good reason for holding off on the purchase of this system?

 

Hard to say for someone else, you have some other very good options as well [HP and Lenovo] and then there's the M4600 supposedly arriving shortly, touchscreen options and all

 

I'm not sure if UEFI yet is a reason to hold off on buying a laptop... eventually it will be... but if you need a computer right now, then I don't really see any good UEFI based laptops on the market. M4600 may be a good bet, if dell gets their BIOS together, but the M4500 is really cheap in outlet...sooo your call really haha.