New to the forum, having m15x gpu and bios issues

Hello all, I am new to the forum. I just bought an alienware m15x for 100 bucks a couple of days ago and I have not had much luck finding which gpu it has in it. I installed windows 10 and was hoping that it would show it but it didnt. I also dont know how to flash the bios. also when the computer boots up it says engineering release, not for distribution or something like that. I am about to open it up and see if there is even a gpu card installed. I cant even find the driver for the cpu, it says there are 8 threads. I am somewhat computer saavy but this is kinda kicking my ass if anyone can point me to the windows 10 drivers, I would really appreciate it. also, there is no information under the battery. Its completely blank. I think its an M15xr2, its nebula red and doesnt have an HDMI port, just vga and display port. also only has one usb and one usb/esata.

 

Should be an M15x. Sounds like you have an engineering sample CPU which is most likely a 920XM or 940XM. Download CPU-Z and it should tell you what you have. Download GPU-Z and it might be able to sniff out your graphics card without drivers installed. Not 100% sure on that. Try downloading speccy as well.

Might have to pull the GPU and take some pictures to figure out what you have. It would not hurt to open up the bottom cover and repaste anyway since you don't no what type of paste and how long it has been. Be sure to clean up the fans and heatsink fins while you are in there.

You got a good deal on this laptop dude.

 

Ok. So I was able to get the CPU and GPU information. Im sorry if I need to be walked through this, but I usually dont have issues installing drivers and messing around with other computers. The processor is a i7 840QM and the GPU is a Geforce 240m. I have tried to download the driver from Nvidia and Dell with no luck. Nothing will install. Dont really know what to do from here. I hope that I didnt buy a paperweight.

 

windows 10 was probably a bad choice, i would installed win7 instead

 

I wanted 10 or 8.1 so I could remote play on my ps4 pro.

 

I have windows 10 on all 3 of my M15x's. It works well.

You might have to edit the inf file for Win 10 drivers. This is not hard, but requires some specific knowledge.

You might also have to disable driver signatures in Win 10.

It would help a great deal if you could tell use exactly what is failing. Is there any type of error message?

 

Well I thought that updating the bios would help but after I flashed A09 my alienware will no longer start up. The light around the head just slowly blinks and nothing happens when I try to turn it on. The bios tool said that the flash was successful. I am probably going to throw it away tomorrow. It think I effed up the motherboard.