Those of you (un)lucky enough to own a shiny Dell XPS 9560 15″ MacBook replacement need to watch out for the current bios update labelled 1.2.4. It’s proving to be quite an issue for Dell owners, causing laptops to be bricked and get stuck at the Dell logo at boot.
I’ve just taken delivery of my new laptop – check out the Dell Outlet store for some cracking XPS deals – and I’ve had a hell of time with it, the bios update being just the last of many issues in the 24 hours since I unpacked it. I installed the update and watched as the laptop rebooted, told me it was updating, then sat there. Ten minutes past, then an hour. Nothing.
I found three solutions that might help you if you are in a similar position.
- Turn the laptop off and then hold the power button down for 25 seconds until the charging light – at the front under the centre of the trackpad – flashes. Then turn it off and on again. This has been said to reset the bios settings and, after having to press F2 to re-enter the BIOS date/time etc you might be lucky. When I tried it it just booted back to the Dell screen.
- Turn the laptop off and press Fn and the power button. This will cause the laptop to boot in to diagnostic mode. You should see the Dell logo appear along with some yellow text in the top right corner. Going through the diag process has caused some people to become slightly happier with their laptop. This didn’t work for me either. My laptop just sat at the boot screen with the yellow text showing “Entering diagnostic boot”.
- This one worked for me. Turn the laptop off and press and hold both the Fn and power buttons and keep holding them down. My laptop booted, then flashed the charging light, then rebooted and then sat at the Dell screen. This time I saw a spinning circle of dots under the logo and eventually Windows appeared. When I was in Windows, well, it wasn’t happy, so I decided to go to the Bios and Apply then exit. Next reboot everything was just fine (by fine I mean it was back to normal, which isn’t fine).
I hope this helps for you. Now I just need to get past the laggy performance in Chrome and anything to do with graphics, the absolutely terrible “killer” WiFi connection and also the slowness of the keyboard response when typing.
All in all, I’d rather have bored out my own ear than buy this laptop, but you live and learn. Next time, I’m going back to Lenovo.
