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A interesting switch for Dell Bios updates

I have a fondness for Dell Laptop’s. I like the XPS series especially.

Recently I was asked to work on a great little notebook the XPS M1130. It would boot fine and then the Laptop would just stop working. I narrowed it down to a bad HD.

Replaced it and while that worked for a while this laptop still would allow me to install the OS but once I put a large CPU load on it.

It would randomly shutdown. Did some heat testing and found the CPU and GPU were overheating after 5 hours of testing to which would make the motherboard panic and shutdown.

Well I checked into the bios and it was running a version A11 and noticed everyone with this same little laptop had overheating issues and a new bois would fix the issue. So I grabbed the Bios off of Dell’s website and made sure the laptop was cold enough to run.

Luckily I got it to a command prompt and attempted to run the Bios update. One thing about the laptop the battery would not charge. So when I attempted to run the executable it told me I needed at least 10% battery power.

Crap I have got this far and I cannot run the update? Do I need to buy a new battery?

Nope luckily I went searching for the switches available on the executable and there was one called “/forceit” I ran that and updated the bios.

After the reboot I was able to get the laptop stable after 24 hours of memory and cpu tests. Worked just fine.