M11xR2 A02 BIOS now available

Well I put in on anyhow and have had no issues yet.
I did notice the Computrack (TM) option has appeared in the bios. I have not touched it but it seems to enable a "footprint" tracking of your PC when it connects to the internet so if lost you can pay to have it traced/found.

 

Yup. CompuTrace is basically LoJack for laptops. It is a piece of software that is embedded in the BIOS that transmits the CompuTrace ID back to CompuTrace for that machine periodically, any time that PC is on the internet. The idea is that if you report your laptop as missing or stolen, then that information could potentially be passed to law enforcement to help you recover your stolen item.

It is sold as a service, and not as software. I think the current price is $50/year or something like that.

 

It doesn't seem like the M11x really supports CompuTrace in the Bios.

From what I understand if your laptop supports CompuTrace/Lojack in the bios (and you bought the license) if someone replaces your harddrive the software agent is embedded in the bios and will reinstall itself and start reporting again.

I bought LoJack and after swapping harddrives to test the feature it stopped reporting. So I'm not sure if the bios setting is doing anything. I have heard of other dell laptops that have the option in the bios, but not actually supporting the feature. The M11x also isn't on the supported systems list, while the M15x and M17x are.

 

Still no A03 =(

 

lol i saw the bios out and saw R1 in the R2 thread!

 

I posted elsewhere about this, but A03 BIOS is delayed until they can get the OSD A04 released. I guess there were some problems with the way that the OSD was posted... Still coming, I don't have an ETA though yet.

 

Thanks for the update, erawneila.

 

Has anyone noticed and improvements to battery life? I'm pretty sure I haven't seen any evidence of it after a week.

 

I noticed that I have dropped 2k mWh on my battery since updating.

 

Wow. That's nothing to sneeze at. I'll have to focus more on this later in the week. Without really testing I haven't noticed anything different. The only reason I ask is that the Hardware Haven reviewer who reported such good battery life said the review unit that he was sent had A02 installed already.

 

definitely no battery life difference here. I've been on battery 2-3 hours each day for about a week, and I'm addicted to checking Battery Bar, so it's rather thoroughly tested. (I'm not saying there necessarily isn't a difference, just that it definitely isn't different for me. It could interact with CC, which I don't use, better, for instance.)

 

Is it me, or is anyone else's fan louder now?

 

Not mine. There were no changes to the fan in A02, so I'm guessing that it's you.

 

Strange....cause when I play Dawn of War 2, the fan goes full blast! As in it's extremely loud....maybe I'll downgrade to the A01.

 

You should expect the fan to ramp up while gaming. As to whether or not it's louder with A02 I can't imagine how it could be based on the release notes and the fact that erawneila said that changes to the fan tables are coming in A03.

 

Well, I'll wait and see.

 

A03 can be found here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/511209-m11xr2-bios-a03-available.html

Thanks.