nutterbutter

Try 7-Zip, sometimes it works better than WinRAR, as for programming a bios chip you're likely going to need an EPROM burner, (if you want to desolder it) but there are a variety of different chips out there...

You could try to 'one-key' re-flash (aka blind recovery),

-download a recent version of bios from the manufacturer

-extract with 7Zip

-find the .fd file (rename it to the recovery filename, different for different versions of Alienwares)

-copy it to a clean FAT/FAT32 formatted USB

-plug in into the eSATA port

-then hold the END key while powering on

-it'll beep a bunch of times and restart a bunch of times

I had no luck finding the recovery filename for your bios, maybe someone else can...

Has anyone tried the Fn+B method. There's a write up for a y580 Edmar Hobby - Electronic: Lenovo Ideapad Y580 Insyde Bios Reset/Recovery. A couple of years back I had a bricked Lenovo come back to life using a similar method... Unless CPU power is cut off completely you should be able to re-flash the bios, unless I'm missing something here.

Number of Processors? I totally forgot about that option. I was tinkering with it for a little while (it's my friends laptop), and after re-installing a clean system (downloaded an install usb from Microsoft/not the OEM restore) it seems to start a lot faster, still not as fast as I'd like, but its down to about 45 sec - 1 min from a previous infinity of 20min... I'm going to see if I can shave that down a bit more...

Maybe NVidia is just at the edge of the current technological advancement. The overhead for designing OC specific chipsets may not be worth it. Honestly, though I'll take a decent desktop build over a mobile build any day, there are just less issues in the long run... Just my 2C.

If you want a sweet gaming rig Desktop is the way to go. On the other hand you could try the newer NVidia drivers, I had an issue with one of the older drivers a couple of months back. I've played BF4 and BioShock Infinite with no issues at decent settings on my y510p.

Minimum System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 7 64 bit or higher
  
• Processor: Intel Core2 Duo or better
  
• Memory: 2 or more GB RAM
  
• Graphics: DirecteX 10.1 compatible (512MB) or better
  
• DirectX: Version 11
  
• Hard Drive: 50 or more GB available space
  
• Sound Card: 9.0c compatible
  

Honestly I don't know why you're having issues. If you have the Ultrabay card, sometimes a new driver update disables the second card, take a look in the NVidia Control Panel...

The Walking Dead

Game of Thrones

Breaking Bad

Roadkill (Motor Trend on youtube)

House

Burn Notice

Re-watched The Dark Knight Rises, I swear the villains are always way more interesting the bat-dude in the Batman films...

Laptop:

Lenovo y510p

i7 4700MQ

8GB DDR3

960GB SandDisk Ultra II

SLI NVidia 750m

Server:

Rackable 2U

2x Intel L5420 2.5Ghz Quad Core 12MB

32GB 667MHz DDR2 ECC

Intel S5000PSL MOBO

2TB + 2TB + 250GB HDDs

Awesome Thread!

Is there a reason why an i5, 8GB ram laptop would take 10-20 minutes to boot up? The HDD passed DTS, no SMART errors, and the windows error checking found nothing, RAM has no issues, tested in a separate laptop. The system was restored from a Recovery partition (i.e. the OS partition was overwritten), same results, takes forever to boot up, granted the HDD is a 5400 rpm with barely any cache, but still it should not take that long, it booted just fine in the past... Bios? Some weird corrupt Recovery partition?