Oh Boy...Dell has me pissed ...Again. I went through this with another Laptop ...

[BlueJazz]

...and now the dreaded Dell laptop monster is back.
(almost) Same old crap.

Customer I know bought a Dell Laptop (Inspiron 1100) from a friend of his whose wife "Moved on"
(with another man)...yeah, I know..I feel like starting a counseling service. :)

Anyway..same ol' shit.
Laptop has bios password..actually "Configure setup" password..(He knows the primary password)

Called Dell...."Sorry, you have to be the original owner or have the original owner fill out a form
and fly to New Zealand, find the Jewel of Medina and tip-toe thru the fucking Tulips" (or something like that)

Anybody have any ideas.. ?

PS: I know on some Dells you can short out certain posts on the board...which I did once but not on a dell inspiron 1100.

Thanks :)

[canetoad]

1. Why do you need the bios pw

Odds on, the owner stumbled into the bios and set up the password without knowing what he was doing. You could call him and ask him what it is.

You may need a password to set options in the bios. I'd be interested in knowing exactly what kind of repair you were affecting to this machine. It's handy to have access to bios config. but not insurmountable if you don't.

If you're professional indemnity insurance is paid up, sure, go short out some terminals on the mobo. I can't believe a computer professional would consider such a course.

If you can't fix it, refer the client on to someone who can.

[BlueJazz]

2. Actually, there really is a good fix for resetting the unknown password...

....in a few series of Dell laptops.

This isn't exactly it but it's something like: Short pin 7 to ground for 5 seconds then short
pin 9 to 7 for 5 seconds..password reset!

It works great but only on a few model dells that have the exposed pins by the memory slots
I forgot which ones...been 2-3 years.

[hobbit709]

4. Shorting those pins does the same as the Clear CMOS jumper on a desktop.

which has straightened out many a machine with a weird BIOS problem.

[BlueJazz]

5. Yep...I took out the Battery (cmos bat) and thought that it might reset but apparently it's..

..set with programmable rom chips.

[BlueJazz]

6. One other thing..::

You would think if Dell HAS to have this ridiculous system Bios password stuff that they would
allow the new owner to call dell...give their phone number, give the service tag, pay for the password via
Credit Card....(maybe 20-25 bucks??) ...Give Dell a valid Email address...have the person hang up..
...have dell call them back to verify Phone # and then send password via Email.

That way Dell would make 20-25 easy bucks...the customer would be happy to get password and most important,
IF the laptop was stolen, dell would have all the info to catch the perpetrator.

Customer whose laptop was stolen would be internally grateful to the caring, wonderful people at Dell..
(We'll certainly buy another Dell when this one goes bad !)
...and good vibes all around.
But Nooooo...everybody (including Techs) are pissed off and have to bother other techs about dells shitty way of doing things.. :) :)

[hobbit709]

3. Could be worse.

I had someone bring me a Toshiba laptop where the hard drive password got set by his kids playing on it. No way of fixing that without knowing the password. Told him to get new hard drive and install Windows from scratch. Needless to say all data on the drive has gone to Never, Neverland.

[struggle4progress]

7. Maybe the service manual will tell you whether there's a mobo jumper

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins5100/en/index.htm

I'm posting on a mac so can't easily access the service manual, which seems to be packaged for Windows

[hobbit709]

8. Html or pdf don't work on a Mac?

[struggle4progress]

9. The HTML service manual is zipped into a Windows exe file which is to be unzipped

using WinZip Self-Extractor. And I'm assuming the pdf owner's manual is not likely to be as useful as the service manual