My laptop shuts down instead of restarting. I restart from windows and it goes to a black screen and then shuts completely down after about 20 seconds. When I use the shutdown command it just hangs at a blank screen forever and never shuts down (I have to hold the power button to get it to shut off). I’ve tried the restart command from the windows 7 I’ve been using regularly. Then from a fresh install on a completely different hard drive (removing the original one). Also from an Ubuntu live DVD and a live USB. Also from freeDOS (with no hard drives at all in the machine). The restart command from all of those just makes the laptop shut down.
I originally noticed this when i had the Nvidia 650M video card issues that this model is known for (en.community.dell.com/.../19498450). I tried updating my BIOS from windows (and freeDOS) but it wants to restart the machine to finish the process. But, the computer can’t restart properly so it can’t update the BIOS. I’m assuming this is a hardware issue (or BIOS) and definitely not a windows 7 issue. Has anyone else run into this problem? Is there any way to flash the BIOS on startup? The computer works fine otherwise, other than missing the video card which is the whole reason I bought it in the first place. :(
I’m currently using BIOS version A11.
This is the link to the latest BIOS update: www.dell.com/.../DriversDetails;osCode=W864&fileId=3290558924&languageCode=en&categoryId=BI