Easter Egg In Bios !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ozzlo said:

this is on most all dell laptops... this is how to make it work on an inspiron 8600...


1 turn off your laptop
2 push and hold the mute button
3 while holding the mute button push the power button (and release the power button still holding the mute button)
4 keep holding the mute button until after computer post's and bios loads
5 the computer will switch to a screen and start performing standard tests on your lappy
6 after the standard tests are complete it will load into a virtual drive a dell technician diagnostics application.
7 have fun performing diagnostic and stress tests on your system.

my favorite tests are the dead pixel test and the HD butterfly access test


a dell technical servive dude told me that today... i tried it and it worked.

let me know if you get it to work on diff model numbers...

also told me the difinitive way to tell if your laptop can support a dothan 2.1ghz or only a bianas 1.7ghz

if your 8600 has parallel or serial ports or bolth then it can only handle a 1.7, otherwise it can handle a 2.1.

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Mr B said:

I'm assuming you'd have to have the original software from Dell loaded on the machine (IE, Dell's OS, and apps, and not have blown away the HDD and installed your own copy) for this to work, right?

I've kinda got it in the back of my head to move in the direction of an 8600 in the future....building one up from scratch from parts possibly, like I'm doing with a Presario 1720US right now.

Yoou kind of lost me on that last bit concerning the ports.... What I get out of what you've said is, if it has ports, it'll take a 1.7, if it doesn't have ports at all, it'll run a 2.1. Is that correct?

B.

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ozzlo said:

yes but only concerning serial and parallell ports... bolth have usb and/or svideo,audio,crt ports


i am determined to say that the tools aren't on the hd but on a chip on the mainboard because it loads the program to a virtual drive (ramdrive), why would it do this if the app was allready on the hd?

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Slackfumasta said:

On your 700m, it's probably the 'i' button that should be near the power button. Hold it down while you turn the machine on.

The diag program is stored on a hidden partition on the hard drive, not in any non-volatile ram chip. If you run through the Windows installation program you can see the partitions when it asks you where you want to install Windows, but it doesn't show up in Disk Management or anything like that.

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Slackfumasta said:

On the 5160 , hold down the 'i' button that is next to he power button. It sayd "Diagnostic Boot Detected" and does it's thing

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Slackfumasta said:

As long as you haven't deleted the partitions that it came with from Dell then you can put whatever operating system on that you want and it will still work.

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