M17x Video problems- help!

I had a thread a while back that pretty much grew into a giant list of my problems, most of which I'm not going to mention here because those will probably require calls to Tech Support-

But I've been researching as much as I can about some of the problems I've been suffering through, a ton of which have required me to power cycle my laptop by holding the button down several times a day and I'm frankly not to keen on doing that again. Everything I can find points to the 5870 vbios update as my saviour (BTW, I have a M17xR2 with Crossfire 5870s) but *no matter WHAT* I do the vbios simply does not work. Ever.

I've reinstalled my drivers myriads of times, doing clean installs each time- Driver Sweeper, CCleaner, etc, etc. Complete clean installs each and every time with the Dell drivers.

I'll install the package for the vbios update, and I'll see a little progress bar that disappears completely. Then I'll go into my dell/drivers folder and find the bios update exe there, try to launch it, see a quick progress bar and it disappears. Shows up for about a milisecond and I can barely make out the word 'Extracting..' at the top of the dialogue box before it's gone.

I have never seen the window where you're prompted to create a disk image or bootable USB stick. It doesn't get that far, ever.

This VBIOS update is just about my last lifeline- At this point I can't ever turn off my laptop or restart it normally, I have to hold down the power buttons. In fact, starting a few days ago even after it 'turns' off and goes quiet the power button light still remains flashing.




EDIT: Completely on a side note, while scanning through this forum I noticed a thread concerning the laptop batteries showing up as plugged in, not charging. I never noticed it before, but lo and behold- the icon, for the first time ever, it seems, does not show a full battery and it says 92%, plugged in and NOT charging. Um. What? I have the A10 BIOS.
I've been hospitalized for about 2 weeks and my laptop was sitting unplugged for a good while when I was gone, obviously turned off though.. I always leave mine plugged in because I sort of use mine as a semi-portable desktop instead but someone moved mine onto a downstairs table and didn't plug it in. Also my fan keeps making strange noises since I came back. I'm going to go into device manager and uninstall the "Microsoft ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery" listing and see if that does anything.

 

Please anyone? The VBIOS update is basically my only hope left even (and especially) after tons of googling, and the fact that the only fix available to me refuses to run is pretty frustrating.

 

Anyone? I really don't know what to do, I can't progress past this- I've tried compatibility mode, running as an administrator, everything, the VBIOS setup exe just refuses to run on my machine.

 

Bump please..

 

Well this is encouraging.