BIOS A04 for M17xR1 now available from Dell

Hi greatday 2882 - welcome to our world. I'm personally still hanging in there with this error & hoping that there'll be yet one more bios update with a fix. Could you please tell us about your AC adaptor (i.e. is it a Delta or Flextronics?)

 

I also have the Flextronics DP/N: J938H. Yea, this has been a fun journey since January this year with this laptop. I called AW tech support on 6/16 about how this happened after I flashed A04, and the tech laughed and asked, "and why are we installing updates without a tech present?".... I must say though, aside from the power adapter warning, with A04 and the 257.21 WHQL drivers, this is the most stable I have seen this thing since i received it.

 

LOL the tech said that to you? Then why bother putting these things on the website. Techs crack me up sometimes.

 

LOL, that's exactly what I said, I told him if they had sold me a working laptop from the get-go, I wouldn't be trying every update possible to fix it

 

This is obviously not a fix, but i found that if you unplug / replug the AC Adapter the second you see the alien head on boot, it will see the adapter as 240W and will not throw up the error message.

 

Does this re-enable integrated video, though? I never use integrated.

 

When i do that little trick, nothing is changed in BIOS, the only time the integrated is enabled is when i get that message, by unplugging and replugging, the system sees that it is actually 240w and does a regular start up without modifying anything.

I take it back, it seems to be random. Last night, I was testing to see if the integrated would re-enable when i unplug / replug and it wasn't last night. I keep Hybrid and Integrated set to disabled, but just now, on my lunch break, i did the plug trick, restarted, then went into BIOS, and hybrid was disabled, but integrated was enabled. So I flashed it back to A03. Didn't have time to test it as my lunch break was over, but i will test it tonight when i get home.

 

Did everyone see this?

 

Nice tip, Chris. Thanks.

 

Thank you for the response Chris. The way i set up my laptop for use, i always plug the AC Adapter into the wall before plugging it into the laptop, so that blue ring is always lit up when i plug it in. By flashing A03 again, I stopped getting the error message and my integrated remains Disabled during startup. Also on a side note, I had huge problems with 257.21 from NVidia last night. After the laptop being on for about 3 hours, every 20 minutes the screen would go white for a couple seconds, then blackout to where i had to hold the alien head and hard reset. I'll be going back to the P05 Dell Drivers as well.

 

Chris, that *might* actually explain it happening to me! I was thinking it was too weird for it to only be occurring to me at the office. Well, at home 99% of the time I plug it in to the wall first. At the office, I'd say maybe 1 in 5 times I'll plug it into the computer before the wall. I never power the machine on before it has power from the wall, though. This also never happened prior to A04, which is kind of weird.

I can test it some more and see for sure if that causes it for me. Thanks for the update!

 

Dear Chris. my response is pretty much the same as greatday2882. I always have the adaptor plugged into the wall & the blue light is lit before plugging into the system. Then I turn on the system.
I continue to always fail with the Flextronics adaptor. I've resisted calling support until I have uninterrrupted time to deal with them & I haven't gone back to an older bios because my other laptop sceen problems have gone away (these days I hesitate to use the word fixed) with version A04.

 

Chris, that solution you lined does NOT solve the problem for me unfortunately. I always have the power supply fully on before trying to boot the laptop

 

same here Chris unfortunately.

My AC adapter is always plugged in and the blue ring is always on before i plug it into the notebook and power it on. Most of the time my notebook is always plugged in as well.
Cheers.

Thanks anyway.

 

I've been running A03 again for the past 2 days, and it doesn't matter how I plug it in, it will boot up normally. I'll try it again if Dell releases an A05.

 

Chris - unfortunately I got the power adapter warning again this morning, too. No go on plugging into the wall first. :-/

 

I have been having this issue as well and have been checking here to see if there was any updates. Since there wasn't I called Dell Support. I was told that is a known issue, go back to A03 and to wait for Bios A05.

Yesterday in frustration I flashed every Bios from A01 to A04, Power Drained, removed CMOS battery...and still running a lame duck...What is odd for me is sometimes I do not get the adapter warning and boot to windows. Still get the non charging battery and if I hit stealth mode I get a notification that says"Stealth Mode not required as low power mode already enabled"

Also, sometimes I get the 193 reading ad sometimes I get no reading at all in the BIOS.

My adapter is Flextronics..

 

In the spirit of noting what I try - here's my latest twist:
With my Flextronics Adaptor at the office (the one that ALWAYS fails & Always has 193 W in the bios on the initial cold start) I now plug the adaptor in, hit the power button and when the Alien head lights up (my is blue) I unplug the adaptor (head turns red) then immediately plus it back in (head turns blue again) - and if this sequence happens before the before the laptop screen displays anything - then the system comes up okay (does not disable discrete cards, battery charges fine, etc.). So I'm going to continue with A04 and hope A05 comes out soon

 

Any news or updates?

Are we any closer to BIOS A05????

It seems the R2 got a new Bios update recently. The A06 a few days ago.

Cheers.

 

Yep, still having the same issue as well. I leave it plugged in all the time. Sometimes it shows 193w in BIOS and sometimes it shows 240w.

I sometimes get the message that an unrecognized power adapter is being used and the laptop even says it is operating on battery with the adpater plugged in.

I don't know about you all but I am getting tired of having to reboot 3 or so times to get this corrected so that I can play a game or two. This is just plain ridiculous.

I tried flashing back to A03 like a tech told me and it hosed the motherboard, got a replacement(which came with A04) and still having problems.

 

I had several boot ups now (over the last 3 weeks or so) where I have booted up, and the power icon indicates AC connected, Not Charging.

In each case I had to do a reset to clear this problem.

and in each case it seemed it was always after running on battery until I was @ 50% or less charge left, and then I powered down, and later booted up with the AC connected.

 

My Update:
I'll skip the hours of wasted time with support and get to the point.

Dell called me yesterday and stated they determined that the issue is with the Flextronic adapter. They are shipping me the Delta one. They told me to stay on A03.

I will post again once it gets here and give it a few days.

 

This is quite entertaining, since I had both adapters and both did it.

 

Same here i've tried and used both adapters and they also caused the ac adapter warning message.

Dell even sent me out a couple of different adapters with no change.

 

Update.

It seems like the Delta adapter I received on Friday has cured the issue. I am on Bios A03. I have plugged the unit in both at work and at home, restarted without issue more times than I can remember. Just hoping it stays that way!!!

 

A03 never had the issue for me. If you had the problem with A03, it's quite likely your power adapter really did have a problem.

 

Same as Elkay - A03 no problems. The power Adaptor warnings started with the A04 update. Although I will say again, the Flextronics (which came with the system) Always fails, the Delta's that we have rarely fail & when they do, the wattage that shows up in the bios on a cold start can be actually higher (once it was 250 W) than the usual 193 W

 

No the problem started when I went to A04. But, when I went back to A03 it didn't fix it. I first thought it was the adapter, they sent me another Flextronics. It was only after I had the same issues with the replacement Flextronics adapter that I searched and found this thread.

 

I went ahead and added a direct link to A03 on Dell's site since they seemed to have removed the "previous drivers" link from the BIOS section for the M17x-R1. Download on the direct link to the A03 page still works as of today.

 

Other versions was not removed - the list is here

You have to select the actual file, in this case the .iso link for A04 - on the right you will see the link to 'Other Versions'

 

Things went from bad to worse for me.

I flashed back from A04 to A03. Now, every single time I start up the laptop from being powered off I get a mesage saying that it is operating on battery power, F1 to continue to f@ for setup. I go into setup, power supply is showing 240w. Save and exit, same message. I have to hit f1 every single time to boot up my laptop now. Might give them a call later to see if I can get the power supply replaced.

 

There is something in the BIOS that warns about using different power adapters,

That needs switching to on otherwise you will get the warning at start

 

Freaking odd. When I went there that night both the Other Versions and Other Formats links were gone. Maybe they were in the middle of updating something. *shrug*

 

My notebook started acting up today.
Started using it for a bit and then the screen would just go completely black. Powered down and started using it again, playing games then the same thing happened again. Now it has happened about 8 times over each time around 10 or 15 mins after i have turned on the notebook. Now it just freezes for no reason every now and again. I have to hold the alien head to power down.

Wonder if its the GPUs or LCD or what?

 

or ram or hdd or motherboard....it could be many different things

I will almost guarantee you it is NOT the LCD

 

Could be the gfx drivers, as that is what I was going through when running nvidia drviers (beta or whql) - totally random freezes or black-outs w/out hdd activity.

 

Aye, what myxcon said, what driver version are you using?

 

I'm currently using the latest from Nvidia drivers.
258.96

 

I have been tracking temps and they all seem fine. I did try to use an external monitor through Hdmi and VGA out but both failed.
I have also noticed that the driver crashed message pops up from time to time for the GPUs when i'm using the 260s in SLi. The freezing and crashing seems to happen whether I'm playing a game or just surfing the net now.

I'm currently back using the 9400m and everything seems fine again. No crashes or freezes. So not to sure if its the other GPUs. I have tried driver sweeping and reinstalling the drivers but that seems to have also failed.

 

So it seems that the problems only occur when I'm running on the Discrete GPUs SLi 260s. The freezing has turned from blackout screens with my music still playing fine in the background to now random lines and colours flashing and moving up and down all over the screen. I also can't move the mouse when this happens.

 

it sounds like nvidia driver related , that happened to me with previous versions of nvidia drivers (always in dedicated with 9400m everything was fine), try uninstalling the display drivers , run driver sweeper in safe mode , and then install dell's new beta drivers (I'm using them now and everything is stable and fine ) here's the link for windows 7 64 bits : http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&releaseid=R273147&SystemID=ALW_LP_M17X&servicetag=&os=W764&osl=en&deviceid=21728&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=4&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=0&libid=6&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&source=-1&fileid=403675

 

on the phone to dell

speaking with dell they are unsure what is going on.
I'm not sure why it keeps freezing. I'm thinking it might be the CPU or damaged motherboard. Speaking to dell they seem to think it is the LCD inverter adapter or something.

Its getting quite annoying now these random freezes. I don't know when it will happen so if i'm working on something at the time, KO.

I'm still awaiting dells technicians. They said there is a 2 week wait or something.
They have agreed to change the
LCD
mobo
2 GPUs
CPU fan
bottom base
and I think that was all.

 

that is dam near the entire laptop....lol

 

heheeh yeh i know hey ehahhaah lol!!!

 

I have the same symptoms as you have. I honestly don't think there's anything wrong with the hardware, but it's the 25x.xx drivers causing it. I had all betas installed, then gave up and returned to the dell 197 latest beta. WIth this one no issues, except performance in games is lower and fps drops in Crysis. Waited a bit for comments on the 258.96 WHQL version. Since at first no one experienced issues, took the chance but the random freezes (screen go black on 260's, flickering on 9400 both with locked up keyboard and mouse) were back (although less frequent (2 in 3 days of use) than the beta versions. Just wanted to let you know

 

Oh okay thanks for letting me know.

I've tried reverting back to dell drivers and a few others the past few days and the random freezes and funny colours still show up. So not really sure whats wrong. I'm guessing it must be hardware now. Guess I shall see what happens once dell finally get out to replace the parts. Only thing I'm worried about is that none of the NCR team here know how to fix Alienware notebooks. So that could be a major problem.

 

They dont fix anything......they just replace parts. You can do that with them watching. There are guides here as well as online.

 

Yeh thats true. The NCR guys told me that they didn't even know how to take it apart or change the parts properly. Most of them have never even opened up an Alienware notebook. I wouldn't mind them just sending me out all the parts and I can do it myself.

Just the last tech guy I had out here said none of the NCR guys have ever worked on Alienware notebooks and most of them were scared to take them apart.

Well the dell guy has come and broken my screen. He doesn't know how to put it back together. Now Dell are saying i will be put on a CAR job where they will take my notebook away for 2 weeks.

AH Shockings!!!

 

This is why I refused to let them tell me I had a hardware problem.

And geez.. I think they're going to swap everything except the keyboard and trackpad lol.

 

I read a few posts stating that this was the new BIOS issues and that the second version of the new BIOS thats an ISO image should fix this... yet I still find myself having the same issue.

The only fix is unplugging, resetting and plugging back in. Any ideas on a more 'permanent' fix?