Windows 10 problem

[John J Miller]

I will try very hard not to rant. Please forgive. At this point I'm frustrated and have an angry longtime customer. Now to be honest the customer caused this by doing something without talking to me (their bad). They have a Dell Inspirion laptop running Windows 7, they foolishly followed the prompts an upgraded to 10. And of course it has Intel video, which has major problems with Win 10. At this point the laptop starts its boot sequence, gets to the rotating circle after which you lose video entirely.

They got a Win 7 recovery cd from Dell. Of course again without consulting me. 1st problem, no instructions with cd (I know what to do with it, they didn't). When they quiried Dell, were told they would have to get a warrenty ($200) or no help would be forthcoming. They got ahold of me and I immediately d/l the updated video drivers from Intel. Then they tell me about the no video entirely. Which means can't update the drivers (can't see what you're doing). Then I find a MAJOR foulup by MS. You can no longer boot to safe mode! Well kind of but you have to be able to boot into Windows to make the change. No video, no safe mode.

Alright then we'll use the recovery disc. So sad, no can do. You have to boot to the disc. Dell in their infinite wisdom did not set it up to boot from cd. You have to go into the bios and change that. Yet another MAJOR problem...Dell put a password on the bios. I know I didn't and am the only one who's worked on it. So I can't change boot sequence.

Has anybody got any ideas (I'm tagging MS and Dell on this) But everyone one else...please jump in

 

[ss202sl]

For the password on the bios - we can't help. Call Dell

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2317969/read-passwords-lock-codes-pin-numbers.html

 

[USAFRet]

I'm tagging your longtime customer on this. Secondarily, Dell.

Get into the BIOS, not safe mode.
Boot from that recovery DVD they apparently got from Dell.
Install (wiping out whatever is on there)

And if Dell put a password on the BIOS, you'll have to go through them.

 

[Godloki]

I have worked on many dells and never seen one where they password protected the bios. f12 is usually how you boot into something other than the hard drive on a dell, however I believe I've also seen it be f10 or f9.

 

[John J Miller]

Just an FYI guys...I was wrong, DELL didn't password it. After customer moved, the HD failed and they had someone close by replace it. They are the butt-heads that did it. They figured that way no one else could work on it but them. At this point customer is sending me the laptop and I will remove the cmos battery which should (finders crossed) dump the bios along with that stupid password.