M1330: A brief History of BIOS Revisions

"A05 is still the best, long live A05!"

Just kidding - clearly anyone with a new CPU or a non Cu-modded 8400M GS or with the "won't eject my Dawn-of-the-Dead DVD" syndrome needs A12+... .

Speaking of which, I've compiled a [rough] list of "known" changes & associates threads:

A15 - Jan '09 (aka Boot-up and/or Fan speed up and/or Down revision...)
1. Enhance Fn+F8 function
x. Support for 8GB memory is... back! (Thx 2 Sesshomaru)

Note that they also added the following: "Please update VGA driver to version A10*(Vista 32bits)/ A05(Vista 64bits) Or later for optimal performance of system"
Clearly this BIOS revision is aimed at a problem with switching between LCD &/or an externally attached monitor (and I doubt that there has been any tweaking done to either boot-up or Fan speeds... ).
*"A10/A05" represents nVidia 176.44 (23 Oct. 2008) and Intel 7.14.10.1409 (7 Jan. 2009) driver versions. My guess is this issue is only with the Intel Integrated graphics.

A14 - Nov '08 (aka hound-dog revision)
1. Added enhancement for Wifi sniffer function.

A13 - Oct '08 (aka removed-from-the-official-list revision)
1. Added support for new versions of Intel CPUs.
2. Added support for 8GB memory.

A12 - Jul '08 (aka speed-up-the-fan-even-more revision)
1. Added enhancement for thermal control.
2. Update GM965 Graphics VBIOS from 1466 to 1588.
3. Update Intel CPU family name.

A11 - Jun '08 (aka speed-up-the-fan revision)
1. Added enhancement for thermal control.

A10 - May '08 (aka the Killa revision / eject-the-disc-already revison)
1. Improve compatibility with Dell Wireless 1390 & 1490 Dell WLAN.
2. Improve system performance on Resume from S3 with Driver Verifier enabled.
3. Added enhancement for optical drives.

A09 - Feb '08 (aka Penryn revision)
1. Updated Intel uCode.
2. Added support for New optical drives.
3. Support new CPUs.
4. Added enhancement for thermal control.
5. Added enhancement for MediaDirect control.

A08 - ? (aka never saw the light of day revision)
1. ah... huh?

A07 - Jan '08 (aka no one really knows... or cares revision)
1. Added enhancement for thermal control.
2. Update GM965 Graphics VBIOS from 1466 to 1588.
3. Update Intel CPU family name.

A06 - Sep '07 (aka battery-eating revision)
1. Enhance the function of the media eject button more stable in multi-CD/DVD installation.
2. Update the nVidia video BIOS to 60.86.45.00.40.

A05 ~ Aug '07 (aka top secret revision)
1. they removed it from their ftp sites before I could jot down the updates...

A02 - Jul '07 (aka VIPs-only revision)
1. Made the sound more stable when close the lid during audio playback.
2. Support the newer version of the Intel processor.

To be updated as necessary.

 

For some reason, this thread made me smile. Am I losing it???

PS. By the way, what happened to A03 and A04, are those also top-secret?

 

Presumably smart owners have been archiving these in case they want to go backwards (or forwards again)...

 

Ha ha, count me in too. Thanks traveller, for this list.

 

Yeah, good question, not to mention A01 and A00 (at least Dell seems to start with A00 on everything else).

When I first got my 1330, I spent a lot of time on this board (probably too much time, lol) but I never heard of anyone with any of the "missing" revisions. My only guess is that they were internal ( alpha, maybe even closed beta) revisions and just to keep things [internally] in order, they upped the rev. levels.

Furthermore... revisions A05 & A13, which were officially listed for some amount of time and then removed were probably deemed to have major faults and thus remove after the fact. Again, I can't come up with a better explanation for their sudden disappearance...

 

Yeah, I'm glad I check this forum from time to time, otherwise, I would had ended stuck with A13 for a long time..

 

So is there any difference, in fan speed / temperature terms, between A12 and A14? Will I notice a drop in GPU/CPU temp if I upgrade, or a decrease in my fan usage?

 

The ones that I've seen on the FTP website are 2, 6, 7 and 9-14.

 

I really doubt it, seeing as Dell was quite "open" and indicated a so-called thermal control enhancement with the A07, A09, A11 & A12 revisions.

And I'm slowly getting used to A12's thermal control policy and the fan still cuts off when my Notebook's idle... (well, at least for a minute... ). With A12 (and the Cu mod) I have the following pattern when idle (defined as viewing "still" material in a browser, etc.):

Fan ........ GPU ........ C0 ....... C1
OFF ........ 54 .......... 37 ....... 39
3054 ....... 48 .......... 30 ....... 32

So the fan trigger-point with A12 is either Core @40C or GPU@55C.

I will load A14 (after all, the "enhanced" sniffer / catcher feature can come in handy when in an Airport or cruising by coffee shops in some foreign town, etc.) in the next days and I will check not only the fan & temp stats, but run my usual battery of tests (TAT, Sandra, 3DMark, PCMark) - just to be sure there is no decrease in productivity.

I hate it when a vendor throttles HW in order to make up for a thermal cooling design issue. It's bad enough that we're loosing out on battery life (even if it is only a small percentage)...

Speaking of which, I'm pleased to report that, unlike A06 & A09, A12 doesn't throttle my CPU when @ "85% TAT" load I ran TAT @85% for ~10mins and my CPU Cores hit 81/75 respectively, without throttling [the CPU multiplier] down

 

I'm convinced it is much more sophisticated.

At least it will be something like:
state fan off ----(Core >=40°C OR GPU >=55°C) ------> state fan 3000rpm

And I'm pretty sure memory temps, chipset temps etc. will also have some influence on the transition trigger.

Did the sniffer/catcher feature change? I think it works as in any other BIOS version. Doesn't it?

What changed is that you can configure the behavior regarding cell cards when using the WiFi switch.

There are two switches: Wifi and sniffer.

 

You are probably right. Would be fun to know what the exact algorithm is

I just copied & pasted the description of change(s) directly from Dell's website... I can only tell you that A12 allows you to search for either "any" or "preferred" networks. Furthermore, you can decide which bands to search for (a, b/g, or a/b/g). You can also decide if it should search for only strong or strong and weak signals.

As for the Wifi on/off "switch", A12 already allows you to select WiFi, BT & WWAN. So I'm not sure where you got your info, but I'm assuming Dell fixed a glitch related to the WiFi sniffer, not the Radio switch... .

 

I'm still on A00 on my 1420, good riddance

I've never taken the time to upgrade my BIOS, since newer updates have the fan turning on at a lower temperature and people have said that this impacts battery life. Is this true?

 

I'm a new member here, but I have been lurking around here for a while. Anyway, I have a Dell XPS M1330 which I have owned since July of 2008 and when I first had it before any BIOS updates the battery time really surprised me because it was something like 4 hours and 30 minutes. Nowadays, with BIOS A13 I'm at about 3 hours and 30 minutes. I remember one of the BIOS revisions took it down to as low as 1 hour and 50 minutes on a full charge. Why does Dell keep messing around with the battery life so often? Revision A13 seems to be great for me so far and I might change to A14 today, I'm not sure if it affects battery life at all.

 

I just upgraded from A12 to A14 and the thermal characteristics are identical. This also means that the fan changes states at the same temps. Do keep in mind though that members have noted that A14 does NOT support 8GB memory like A13 does... .

 

and....the question is...
where can I find M1330 A05 Bios ? I´m looking all over the posts...and i can´t find a good working link....

Can somebody post a link somewhere??? or..please...send me a private im...
thanks.

 

Hola!

Looks like you managed to find yourself a copy of A05

What is it about A05 that makes you want to reload it... battery-charge life? Don't get me wrong, both Rachuk and I loved A05, particularly because of it's seemingly low battery usage.

However... even with the fact that I have been using the Cu mod, A05 / A09 allowed the GPU to reach the mid 60s before triggering the fan. I don't know if 60 is such a big deal, but with this talk of [this series of] nVidia chips being extra-sensitive to temperature "cycling", I'm not sure I would go back to A05/A09... .

I'm currently on A14 and yes, the fan kicks on sooner than later but apart from that, it seems to be a "efficient" BIOS... . At least it doesn't throttle my cores as early as A09 did!

 

A09+ & MediaDirect Partition Access

After reviewing this thread and this post I've come to the conclusion that Dell changed how the MD button works starting with BIOS revisions A09 and forwards.

Anyone have A09+ and can still access Dell's MD partition (& the residing XP OS) with the press of the MD button from a powered-off state...

 

If anyone wants to experiment, I think that A09 is still available on the Dell FTP server.

 

With "A09+" I meant revision A09 or newer (A10, A12, A14...)

 

...anyone?

 

Flashing the bios is easy and fast and no data gets lost. Somone should install it and try. I'd try but I killed MD and the recovery partition.

 

Flashing a BIOS has certainly gotten safer over the years, but I still wouldn't flash the BIOS "just for fun"... .

My request though doesn't require anyone to flash the BIOS - my guess is that 1/2 of 1330 owners have A09 or a higher revision installed and I'm just asking one of them to check what happens when they press the Media button (in power-off mode)...

 

Yes, works for me. My Notebook came with A07 and I had every BIOS till A14 on it. It always worked and still does, while I'm on A14.

What you may want to try:
. deinstall MD from Windows (and I think it will also discard contents of the MD partition - not only the files of the Windows installation)
. reinstall MD from within Windows (and it will overwrite date on MD partition)
. hopefully your computer will boot MD from power state off

 

Thanks for the feedback & suggestion. Makes me wonder what happened to the original installation & how a motherboard swap could possibly affect it...

I have 3.3 installed and I believe it's the same version as the one shipped (on Dell's CDs).

 

I have 3.3 installed as well.

Yes, a motherboard swap can affect MD functionality. At times of MD 2.x the information where the MD partition is found was found in the first sectors of your harddrive. This behavior changed in MD 3.x. And I'm pretty convinced this information is now present in some NVRam embedded in the Mainboard.

It should be possible to fix it with the tool RMBR.EXE contained on the MD 3.3 disk. It's usage is as follows:

Code:

E:\DellKit>rmbr /?
rmbr usage is as below:


rmbr VenderName XPProPartitionNO XPEmbeddedPartitionNO
VenderName              available values: DELL HP Generic SPF Demo
XPProPartitionNO        available values: 1 2 3 4
XPEmbeddedPartitionNO   available values: 1 2 3 4
Example
rmbr Generic 1 2

If you try that one be sure to know how to fix your vista partition in case it messes up. e.g. by means of the Vista repair console or Gparted and setting the correct active partition.

Anyway: The default Dell installation has Vista on Partition No. 2 and MD in a logical partition. In my case MD is partition No. 7. Although rmbr help says only values of 1 - 4 are valid I have read some contractionary information about this issue. Any some people this one helped:

rmbr.exe DELL 2 7

You may want to try different partition numbers. But the partition numbers are the ones you assign to the two buttons.

 

Wow, that's quite an interesting theory! Too bad there isn't some way (command) to enumerate the existing partitions. As it stands, MD & the 2.5GB space it takes up isn't worth risking my environment.

I have to wonder how you managed to get up to seven partitions... . when I use Window's own Disk management tool I see the following:
110MB: "EISA Configuration"
10Gb: NTFS, Primary Part. (Recovery)
136GB NTFS OS (System, boot, etc)
2.5GB Primary Partition.

so if I were to map the physical locations the cmd would be:
rmbr DELL 3 4

But this is actually another topic and I've already noted a few threads on MD and dual-boot + MD button, etc. so thanks for your input & I'll give your suggestions some thought

 

Actually there is:
. open a command prompt
. diskpart
. (a new window will pop up)
. select disk 0
. list partition

The output will be something like this:

Code:

  Partition ###   Typ              Größe    Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    OEM                 47 MB    32 KB
  Partition 2    Primär              32 GB    47 MB
  Partition 0    Erweitert           80 GB    32 GB
  Partition 3    Logisch             46 GB    32 GB
  Partition 4    Logisch              9 GB    79 GB
  Partition 6    Logisch           3906 MB    88 GB
  Partition 7    Logisch             18 GB    92 GB
  Partition 5    Logisch           2055 MB   110 GB

Sorry, I've a german installation. The interesting part is: While the order of the partitions listed corresponds to the physical location on the hardrive (LBA starting blocks increasing), however the partition no. corresponds to the logical numbering (required by RMBR).

As you can see: The last partition is the MD partition in my case which is 2055MB and at position 110GB. However it's logical number is 5. This is due to partitions in extended partitions being lined up in a list. And within this list the MD partitions comes before others.

In your case it seems much simpler: You don't seem to have an extended partition. This looks good to me, but you might want to verify with diskpart:

 

Vielen dank

Also, so schaut's aus (So, this is how things look):

1 OEM 110MB
2 Primary 10GB
3 Primary 136GB
0 Extended 2560MB
4 Logical 2559MB

But of course now I'm totaly confused as to which values to use with rmbr...

Btw, you were right about a mobo replacement's effect on MD:
" When the machine is off, pressing the power button turns the computer on. Pressing the MediaDirect button instead turns the computer on and additionally sets a bit in the bios cmos registers."

 

Well...
I executed rmbr with 3 4 and this caused the MD button to load the MD screen and then freeze. The power button still booted into VISTA. So I then tried 3 5.

I first tried the MD button and it loaded the MD screen and then nothing. I then used the power button and got the error msg that no boot record was found on the internal disk....

I loaded up the VISTA CD, went into recovery and in a cmd window, ran the BOOTREC /FIXMBR. The pgm came back with a "successfully executed". Rebooted but still no boot record found...

I also tried the BOOTREC /FIXBOOT parm but that returned an error ("not found" or similar).

what's my next course of action? Needless to say, I'm no longer concerned about getting the MD partition to work, I just want VISTA back without restoring or installing it...

 

Try pressing MD button a second time from power state off. This often works, since behind the scenes the functionality of MD button swaps the partitions around. Since you're german this is the only site I know of that talks about it:
http://www.servicemensch.info/Online/Dell-MediaDirect-3-3-Tipps,ARTIKEL,8.html

After you pressed the MD button a second time the normal power button should work.

Use GParted LiveCD and boot it.

Now verify if you are stuck in the intermediate partition table (that's the third one in the above link and you can tell by the partition ID which is 0C and contained in partition slot one). If you are stuck in the intermediate partition table, then shutdown notebook. Power on with MD (it won't work, never mind). Restart GParted Live CD again and have a look at the partition table. Does it have Dell Utility recovered?

If yes go ahead and mark the 3rd partition active. That's the one containing Vista. Hopefully after that Vista will launch again.

I do know sufficiently about MD and certainly didn't mean to corrupt your filesystem. Hope you/we can figure that quickly.

7oby

 

Unfortunately not this time around... . When I press either the MD or main pwer buttons I always get the
"No bootable devices - strike F1 to retry..." etc.
The only difference between both buttons is the "Dell MediaDirect tm" splash screen but I am certain that is stored in the BIOS and not on the HDD.

When in recovery mode + DOS box, I can run dpart and I see the same exact partitions still. I can even switch over to the VISTA partition and navigate through the subdirectories & files, etc.

Well I'm about to burn a GPart CD... let's see if I can get somewhere with that. Thanks for the support, btw

 

Although I did create that GPart CD, I didn't get the chance to use it because I managed to get the main OS back

Turns out I followed instructions that were really meant for non-MD dual-booters and I was executing Dell's rmbr command and immediately following it, the Windows' fixmbr sub-command. So I was essentially negating the rmbr changes and never got anywhere. This time I performed an rmbr DELL 3 4 only and now I'm back to state where the main pwr button starts VISTA and the MD button doesn't do jack. But I pressed the MD button a few times and at least it also doesn't brick my 1330

What I find interesting is the fact that VISTA shows the MD partition as being 100% FREE SPACE. I don't know if it's because the partition is "inactive" or if the partition somehow did get wiped out (not by me, though...) but that might explain why the MD button doesn't do anything. On the other hand, the MD button doesn't produce the "No bootable devices - strike F1 to retry..." msg anymore to something's changed, that's for sure.

Finally, sorry to all that I've gone way off-topic* and I hope that we can now get back to the OT...

* 7oby, if you have any thoughts on the MD topic, plz PM me instead, thx!

 

Hey! What about adding A15, to keep the list up to date?

 

Is the fan speed increase of Bios upgrades reliant on an nVidia card being detected ?

Asking as my m1330 is running Bios 11 and uses the inbuilt x3100. Should I upgrade to the latest BIOS ? Will my fan control stay the same ?

 

Done deal

 

A15.. again supports 8GB of RAM..

 

kewl & thx
(updated)

 

One thing I really don't understand: sesshomaru is the one reporting 8GB of memory don't work with A14:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4192615#post4192615

However others have A14 working with 8GB:
http://pubforum.info/welcome/BLOG/tabid/78/EntryID/8/Default.aspx

And I suppose most likely with the same kind of memory modules (G.Skill). While A13,A15 do support 8GB, what's the deal with A14?

 

I am using Kingston modules.. not G.Skill.. Anyway.. on A14.. the system doesn't boot with even a single module installed in either slot..

 

Anyone still hold A05 bios? I'm currently testing WWAN compitable.. So far only A02 works with WWAN card.. I'll be glad if someone could supply me A05.

 

I've got a copy. I'll shoot you a PM.

Oops; can't send you a private msg. Send me a PM with an email where you'd like the file. And make sure your email won't bounce back files with attachments.

 

Dont see why for you only A02 works with wwan had no issue with any of the bios to date. PM me with email address so I can send you A05 bios.

 

only for mc8775 or 3rd party brand.. I read in some forum that 5520 still work with new bios..

 

my pm not activate yet.. can i post my email here?

 

Sure. Some people don't like to so that's why we asked for PMs, but yes, you can.

 

feel free to email me dcsh79 at gmail.com Thanx.. I'll let you guys know the result after i try A05.. anyway bios A02 is stable on my xps... I had a T5750 with 3gb ram.. cu mod on gpu ofcoz =)

 

I'm having a hard time to understand you're issue. Maybe you can help me:

. You own a HSDPA mc8775 Mini PCIe card that works with A02, but with none of the official successors. Via FTP available successors are: A06, A07, A09, A10, A11, A12, A14, A15.

. You're asking for A05 to do Dell a favor in trying to find the last version that worked? If that's the case, I'm convinced you can work that out with Dell technical support. And they'll assist you.

. Mini PCIe is a standard and its bootstrap protocol is the PCI protocol. There aren't too many things than might go wrong. The conclusion is: If something doesn't work in most cases it's a driver issue, not the BIOS.

 

Yes sir i bet it works on A01 too.. no luck with others except A02.. A05 is taken down from the official site.. I wonder if they can help me on it, beside i'm not from US + my warranty got expired.. It would be nice if anyone of you can send me a copy of A05 as I dont wish to spend any $$ calling dell.. Thanks everyone..

ps: no card detected with other bios.. I dont think is driver issue in this case.

 

@laziepig,

I'll tell you right now: GMail will bounce back any .exe attachment anyone sends you.

 

but they dont reject zip file =)