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from the "bricks"-is-absolutely-accurate-this-time dept.
The Register (aka El Reg) reports:
Many [who installed the latest Dell BIOS update] now cannot boot up their machines. One typical explanation posted was: "Add me to the list Dell Inspiron 20 model 3052, updated on the weekend, woke up to a solid amber/orange light and a dead computer. Contacted Dell on facebook and this is what I was told "The updates Dell releases don't affect the system. But it would enhance the performance of the system" ummmm no....if they broke they need to fix it."
[...] Some users complained screens cycled through red, green, blue and white while others saw nothing but an amber or red power light and a dead screen.
The main model affected by the allegedly dodgy update is the Inspiron 20 3052, although a few users reported similar problems with Inspiron 3252s.
[...] Dell's initial reaction was to tell customers they needed to buy new motherboards.
[...] Although complaints in the forum date back to May 12, Dell took four days to offer up a possible solution... which users subsequently said didn't work. Dell has yet to send [El Reg] a statement.
Have we saved anyone from a big headache?
The relevant Dell forum thread can be found here.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday May 20 2017, @10:32AM (2 children)
Meanwhile I'm simply missing the days of having to move a jumper on the motherboard to be able to write to the BIOS in the first place. ;)
(Note that I am typically not missing the days of having to manually assign IRQs and I/O ranges via jumpers however)
Thanks for the link to the clip-in programmer, that was exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday May 20 2017, @11:14AM (1 child)
Yeh, I sure felt a lot more comfortable when I had the security of knowing exactly what my machine was doing. I knew better than to feed it rogue .exe or .com files off the bulletin board systems, and knew full good and well I could read anything safely as long as I did not use an ANSI editor. Plain old ascii was safe as could be. Worst they could do is fill my screen full of crap, which disappeared almost immediately with a few hits of the enter key.
Even if they did infect the old systems... it wasn't all that much problem to clean it back out. Kinda like someone ringing your bell, tossing a bag of crap in your house when you open the door, and running. Yeh, a mess. But it wasn't a show-stopper. Just an annoyance. Gotta go clean up the mess.
Those days where my computer was about as trustworthy as my old mechanical typewriter are gone.
I thought you might like that clip in link... that's the reason I looked it back up for ya. You were hinting around with it in your link. I have done it that way but I do not like doing it that way, as sometimes the clip does not make good contact and I get a bad load. And sometimes some design idjit hooks the write enable pin up in such a way I have to force override some other totem-pole output of some gate, possibly damaging it in the process. I'd much rather have that nice standardized programming pin layout used by all those off-the-shelf SPI programmers. If I had my druthers, I much rather have a nice SPI access to the EEROM, with the jumper I have to physically install or remove to enable WRITE. I flat do not like things like rewriting my machine's BIOS done behind my back.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 21 2017, @09:09PM
You are saying you feared that ansi graphics on bulletin boards would harm your computer?
Do you visit this website in Lynx, as well?