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KA
Ken at Sunward
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December 4th, 2018 13:00
Inspiron 3847, BIOS update fails
An attempted "critical update" of my Inspiron 3847's BIOS has failed (details below). This failure apparently didn't damage my computer, but it also didn't update my BIOS. So my questions are:
- From other posts to this forum, I gather that BIOS updates can be risky and even fatal. Do I really need to do this "critical update"? What is the danger if I don't do it?
- If I do need to do the update, how can I do it successfully?
Details:
This popped up on my screen:
I clicked INSTALL. The screen looked like this for maybe 30 seconds:
Then it looked like this for about 3 hours:
I finally clicked CANCEL. Then it looked like this for another hour:
So I finally just hit the close box. The whole "Dell Update" box disappeared, and as far as I can tell the computer still works OK.
I've been through this whole process twice now. Same story both times.
The computer is several years old, running Windows 7 Pro. As far as I know it has never has a BIOS upgrade.
3309
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Posted December 5th, 2018 13:00
And now do yourself a big favor and disable or uninstall SupportAssist and/or Dell Update, whichever was giving you those pop-ups. (We see can't see your images until they get moderated/approved.)
BIOS updates can be risky and allowing SupportAssist or Dell Update to manage it makes the update that much more likely to fail and kill your motherboard.
If you decide you do want to update, update directly to the latest version without any of the in-between versions. And do it manually by downloading the .exe file to your desktop and running it in Windows. Close all open apps first, and always a good idea to temporarily disable your antiviral suite while the update is running.
JOcean
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Posted December 4th, 2018 17:00
Count yourself lucky that you had to cancel the update and it did not affect your system. The BIOS update is a suggested update based on one of the many Intel security notifications. Do you have to do it, no. It is merely a suggestion. Take a look at the following post.
https://www.dell.com/community/Inspiron/What-is-the-reason-for-updating-my-Bios/m-p/6223696#M41743
I am not a Dell employee...I am forum volunteer
Serious work on an E5430 and constantly building and working on an i5-6500 Desktop