M17xR1 BIOS A06 ('Plugged in, not charging' + Touchpad Polling Fix) Discussion Thread

What adapter do you have: the 210W or the 240W one( see BIOS)
If your battery doesn't drain,it means it's charging. What makes you say it's not charging,when you click the icon in the system tray does it say "pluged in" at least?
Run some games/movies at full brightness and see if you get your battery empty.(if it's charging in the first place)
did you have the same problem with the A03 BIOS?

 

It's the 240W charger, and 98% of the time, the battery does not charge. Occasionally it will register that it is plugged in and then recharge the battery, but the vast majority of times it does not. The time remaining on the battery will stay at 62% or whatever level it is at while plugged in and not rise in terms of power reserve. Battery power does not run out, but I have used the A06 BIOS and still have to hit F2 during the powering-up process in order to get my GTX 260 card to run instead of it booting up normally as it should.

Like I said, minor but really annoying. A06 was supposed to fix this issue and it has not. Booooooo.

 

You have to go into the BIOS because it is defaulting to the 9400m since the system thinks it is running on battery

At least that is my best guess

 

Argh. Um, how would I go about doing that? Sounds a little daunting.

 

Press F2 at the Alienhead , when in BIOS look for Integrated Graphics [Disable] also Hybrid [Disable]

 

No dice. I also turned off the laptop, removed the battery and AC adapter, held the power down for 30 seconds, reinserted the battery, plugged in the AC and turned it on again. Once the screen came up I entered BIOS, checked the graphics to disabled, saved, exited and came up to the Windows screen... and there was no change.

Oh, theoretically once in BIOS I should have seen that the AC power adapter was running at 193W instead of 240W, but that was not the case. This was suggested to me from the Dell website community, so now I am going to do ANOTHER Google search and see what the hell else I can do.

Thoughts?

 

Tried just reflashing the bios?

 

Several times, as a matter of fact. A peek at the BIOS shows that the computer is indeed running version A06, and while the battery power meter doesn't go down while it is plugged in, it also doesn't go up, either, and that includes when it is powered down and has the AC cord plugged in.

 

Let's not rule out the possibility of a bad battery/charger.
If you take out the battery and start your system only plugged with the charger are you able to change the Graphic settings and start on the dedicated(you should be able to)?

 

The bad battery charger scenario is easy, call dell tell them it is not working and to send you a replacement.

 

I'm 90% sure it's a battery issue since the charger won't let your system die(run out of power but still providing some). Do as scook9 said.
If your laptop didn't receive any power at all it would have drained the remainder in the battery.Since you're saying the metter doesn't go up nor down means the battery has a hard time getting charged.
I'm rulling out the charger issue since if it was the case you would've gotten a message at system start up.

If you have CPUId Hwmonitor or Hwmonitor 32 can you tell us the wear level of your battery?

 

It could also just be a bug in the bios just like MANY saw with A04

Does flashing back to A03 fix the problem?

 

Well, actually, I do get a message at startup. I removed the battery and started up the system... it told me that the attached AC cord wasn't a 240W model and said would start with embedded graphics on battery power unless I decided I wanted to go into BIOS and change it to the GTX 260. I wonder what would have happened if had called its bluff?

I don't know how to roll back the BIOS so I'm still running the A06. Battery still does not charge, holding steady 58%. Asking Dell to replace battery/ac cord is unlikely since it is beyond warranty, and it really speaks to lousy quality if the battery or AC cord conks out after only 15 months and they want 90 bucks for a replacement.

 

I would've given you the A03 but I'm not home,but you can go to Dell drivers and support select your model or use your service tag(on the back of the laptop)
Select BIOS -> download and on the next page you should have a link to eighter previous versions or other ver. and on the next page you should have a link to the A03 BIOS
Download it,follow the instructions and flash. See what happens with the charging process.

 

Zombiegoat, I think katalin_2003 is possibly correct about the problem being the battery... good chance of it anyway. If you go back to the A03 BIOS and there is no difference, that's going to be an even better indication the battery might be the problem.

But, before we condemn your battery as a possible cause I wanted to point out that the forced power discharge you mentioned doing a day or two ago was not done in the correct order. You installed the battery prematurely. Please try again, following these steps:

1. Disconnect AC adapter and remove battery
2. Hold down the power button 2 minutes (not 30 seconds)
3. Plug in the AC adapter, but do not install the battery yet
4. Power up, log into Windows running on AC power only
5. Install the battery, wait 1 minute, remove, wait another minute, then reinstall the battery

These are the steps Alienware Support recommends. Please let us know if this helped, or not.

 

A03 didn't seem to make any difference except my touchpad went fritzy, so I'm back at A06 again.

All right, did the updated power down procedure and no dice. Interestingly, I only seem to get the "your AC cord is not 240W" message after completely powering down the unit and then turning it on again; when I simply restart the computer, it doesn't give me this message and goes right to Windows logon.

Is it the battery? Really? After 15 months? That's pretty chintzy, IMO.

 

Sorry that did not help. It was free and worth trying. Bummer.

There is a BIOS warning beep that will occur with instructions to press an F key to continue or another F key to enter the BIOS. This can be turned off in the BIOS. I have it turned off on my system because it is really obnoxious to me. This also normally only occurs from a cold boot and not a restart as you mentioned. And, I believe it is intended by design to occur (unless disabled in BIOS) when you are booting from a battery. My system used to do it occasionally with the AC adapter connected even when the machine was brand new, so I just silenced the silly thing and have not that issue since doing so. It's rare that I get the "plugged-in, not charging" warning now, and especially rare after updating to the A10 BIOS. (The A10 is for the R2, not the R1. I think the R1 uses the A06 BIOS as the latest and not everyone is pleased with that version.)

It is very possible that your battery is no good, but it sounds as though you could have an issue with the AC adapter. If my understanding is correct, the proprietary AC adapters used on Alienware, Dell, HP and some Apple computers have a chip of some sort that "talks" to the BIOS and tells it "I'm an approved adapter". If that is going wonky on you, then it could explain what you are experiencing. In the highly unlikely event you know someone with a machine like yours, see if they will let you try using their AC adapter and battery. If not, your ability to troubleshoot this is going to be very limited.

It's unfortunate that you are out of warranty. Have you contacted Alienware to see if they will allow you to extend the warranty. If you have not tried, it's certainly something I would suggest that you ask about. Be sure to call 1-800-ALIENWARE and not Dell Support. If they will let you it would be worth it, as anything you do outside of warranty is probably going to cost you money. Most of the proprietary components for the the M17x are very expensive. so, you may as well spend money on the warranty instead of repairs on a machine without warranty. Unless you can afford to replace your system with something equivalent, these machines are just too cotton-picking expensive to own without warranty protection.

 

Will do. At least it's only three and a half months out of warranty period, hopefully that will grease the gears considerably. Thanks for all your help.

 

Bad news it's that if you're out of warrenty already Dell won't extend it or add another one.A good BIOS fix would be the one to bypass the chip comunication as i do believe he's the one to be blamed.
Would've been great if you had somebody you know with a m17x to test with his charger/battery.

EDIT: just got some info from M3TH0D1C4L that it might be possible to purchse warrenty but you'll have to pay a reinstatement fee(49$) that's cool if it's true.

 

katalin_2003 EDIT: just got some info from M3TH0D1C4L that it might be possible to purchse warrenty but you'll have to pay a reinstatement fee(49$) that's cool if it's true.

Man, that is awesome if it's true.

 

I'll be looking into this Monday, and I'll keep you all apprised of what happens. Thanks for all the info, gang.

 

Anyone have a mirror for the USB drive .zip version of A06? The link in the OP is dead.

 

Is that a no?

 

If you go to Welcome to Dell Technical Support and put in your model information, they should bring you to the page where you can get the BIOS. As far as I know, the Dell main page link still works.

 

Hey, weenus... Here's a link to A06 for the R1.

You can use the HP USB Disk Storage Format tool to make a bootable USB drive and copy the BIOS files to the drive, then boot from it and run A.bat. You can download that here or use the attachment below.

You will need DOS or Win98 boot disk files. You can get those here. (I could not attach in zip due to size restrictions.)

 

And wouldn't you know, the cord is now working fine again, the battery is totally recharged and the performance issues I had playing Wolfenstein (2009) are history. Running at max resolution, max details... looks gorgeous, just the way it did before the power issues made me say every time I started up, "No, curse you, I don't want to do INTEGRATED GRAPHICS!"

However, I'm still looking into reinstating that warranty. Then we'll burn the bridges as we come to them. Still love my laptop, just need to get a few details ironed out.

 

Outstanding, zombiegoat! I'm glad to hear it's working smoothly again. It's hard not to love an M17x, ain't it?

 

Oh God, yes. When it's functioning properly, there is no finer machine. I know that a lot of people have had major issues with the R1's, but this is my first stumbling block and that's a pretty good track record after almost seventeen months. Still going to reinstate that warranty if possible (I'm siccing my wife the attack dog on that call), but I really do love this computer. That Nebula Red finish is absolutely gorgeous and always a conversation-starter at the local coffeehouse.

Thanks for all the help.

 

And then the power cord falls out, I stick it back in, it doesn't recognize there's an AC cord plugged in and I'm back to my performance hit on gaming. Restart of system is no good at fixing the problem.

? Seriously.

EDIT: Okay, now it's seeing the plug again and everything is back to normal. Freakin' power cords, how do they work?

 

Yep, it's that silly proprietary AC adapter doing it's thing. It's so dumb that the AC adapter has to "shake hands" with the mobo. Sometimes it takes longer than it should for that to happen. If it would always work instantly, then it would not matter that much.

It sure would be nice for their customers if all OEMs that employ this sort of Nazi compliance tactic would come up with BIOS updates to turn that off. They're probably spending more money in warranty parts replacements and support calls than they will ever gain by selling overpriced proprietary parts to out-of-warranty customers.

 

BIOS A07 released - CPU Throttling fixed.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...cpu-throttling-fix-released-discuss-here.html

Continue discussing current BIOS issues in linked thread.