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Got her. Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet I don't know how I missed that one. It's nowhere near the battery though. Over by the WLAN flimsy insulator.. flimsulator? But this board will be choochin' again what fer only 20 Canuckistani rubles. Hopefully the passworded one will...

Did you get the drivers you were after? If you still can't find them, I go to the device manager, properties page for the problem device, Details tab, then the "Hardware Ids" in the dropdown. Google the VEN_### and DEV_### and you should find the device name so you can grab drivers from the...

Thanks for the reply. Middle of the night? That was just lunch time for me. It's not even midnight yet. ;) One is still totally scrambled. The other now appears to load to a power on password. I'm not sure if they tried to flash to get rid of this, failed, succeeded and the password stayed...

I think it would be very rare to have a virus actually infect the BIOS region unless it's a very old computer. Most modern chipsets have BIOS virus protection, and it would have to have written itself at least checksum before flashing if not a lot more to defeat antivirus countermeasures. This...

Honestly, I'd make sure there's no junkware running and throw in an SSD. See if that makes a difference. It should at least boot and start programs faster. You can get decent ones 80-120 GB for $40 right now and it's pretty easy to clone disks even with Win10.

Look around the battery or BIOS chip for a CLR, CL_CMOS or anything like that next to a tiny pair of bare square solder pads. Jumpers on laptops are usually bare pads rather than pins. If you find the right spot, you'll want to short it for a second with the power OFF. If that doesn't work...

Sounds odd. Have you used a utility to do a surface/physical scan for bad sectors? Check the SMART data as well. Hopefully the drive is not damaged.

I've not known the "Dell" or other manufacturer name backdoors to work. Ever. You also can't clear it by jumpering pads or removing the CMOS battery on many newer laptops. In those, it's stored in some type of nonvolatile memory. A boot disc works on some systems but cannot work on others...

Generally those apps that are supposed to make your computer faster don't work. Little_pob is right: nothing beats a clean installation. +1 on CCleaner, but you also want to go into its options and disable starting with windows as well as the 2 monitoring options. I'd also disable auto updates...

I've done enough simple electronics that I could probably read a schematic if someone just has one of those to link or send me. Might save you some effort. :)

I'm trying to fix a couple of newer Dells which had bad BIOS flashes. It seems I'll need to hot swap with one good chip or get new ones pre-programmed. I'm not sure where the chips are on these laptops though. They're both Inspiron 17" 5000 series. I can can try to find the exact model...