Alienware 17 Overclocking BIOS Recovery Guide

As many of you may know there has been a recent finding in our Alienware 17 & 18 motherboards, that they have a dreaded form of flash memory called nvram. Unlike other manufacturers there has been absolutely no sure fire way to clear the bios after bad overlcock settings have been applied. Yet many semi-conclusions have been stated, such as switching the processor and even turning your machine on and off dozens of times. I am however here to provide a short and simple guide of what I had done to clear my bios settings. Let's begin.

Step One: I had purchased the allotted 4700MQ Intel CPU, as stated in other posts, on ebay. While waiting for it to arrive I wanted to do some digging. Maybe to find other ways to clear the bios. While stumbling through the techinfernoe forum I had come across this thread: Alienware 18 Teardown , reading through it I saw post # 7. It gave me an idea. So I set off powering the machine off and on, off and on, holding down the FN key on the keyboard. After about the 25th power cycle the machine booted. This was all done last night. I thought I was finished, and I could now apply the overclock settings, BUT I WAS WRONG.

Step Two: Once applying the settings the computer continued not to boot. Or more specifically not to post. So I had a theory, some how the settings in XTU must of been corrupted, to prove this however I would have to do some testing. This is where the 4700MQ came in. I popped this bad boy in and low and behold the system booted. I then went into the bios, pressed load default settings. Applied. And then powered down and inserted my 4900MQ. With this down I assumed I could now boot the system and apply my overclock settings. Once again however, I WAS WRONG .

Step Three: When booting to windows, I first uninstalled xtu, but left my old profiles. Restarted the system re installed xtu, and applied my existing profile. Rebooted my system only to find yet again it would not post. This gave me the conclusion that my profiles were defective. So after another bios reset with the 4700MQ, I set off and put my 4900MQ back in went back into windows. This time however, I uninstalled xtu, removed the old profiles and restarted. Once after doing this I ran disk clean up, and cc cleaner registry section. Then rebooted. After this I booted back into windows and re installed xtu. Manually applied overclock settings. REBOOTED. AND VOILA . System booted perfectly.

Hope this helps!

 

One way is to change the CPU, then reset the BIOS to default settings. Another way involves inducing CMOS error by removing the CMOS battery and booting up without the RAM sticks in.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-if-one-runs-into-no-post-messed-up-bios.html

 

Thanks for sharing your experience and what did the trick for you. kh90123's suggestion should also work flawlessly.

 

Exactly I just went a bit more in depth, when the settings weren't sticking.