Month: November 2011

MMS 2012 Homepage

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Rod Trent of MyITForum had noticed on the recently published MMS 2012 homepage, that two other MyITForum’ers were in the MMS in Action photos.  Myself and Joey Gleason!  It made for a good laugh for the day anyhow….

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This entry was posted in Miscellaneous Ramblings.

Automating Dell Vostro 330/360 BIOS Updates

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The majority of the desktops in our environment are Dell Vostro all-in-ones.  Even though this is consumer-line hardware and not subject to Dell’s OMCI tools, we purchased this model because of price and because Dell didn’t have a OptiPlex all-in-one.  The BIOS installers for these Vostros do not properly respond to the silent/unattended switches that they should support.  Fortunately there is a work-around with this simple process.

  • Extract the WINFLASH files:  Just simply double-click the installer then when it’s at the first dialog box for the upgrade, make a copy of the files from C:\ProgramData\WINFLASH.  Cancel out of the installation.
  • Create a script to run the command “winflash.exe %pathToWinFlash%\BIOS.bin /p /b /n /r“.  Note that it is extremely important that for BIOS.bin that you include the full path to the file because winflash.exe doesn’t check that its local directory contains the .bin file.
  • The restart of this will be suppressed, so remember to restart the computer after installation.

Voila!  You have now upgraded BIOS on the Dell Vostro 330 and/or 360.

This entry was posted in How-To and tagged .