A 515-54G more fan noise after Bios Update 1.17?

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Answers

  • Furbatmg07
    Furbatmg07 Member Posts: 7

    Tinkerer
    egydiocoelho said:
    @Suvan and @Furbatmg07 OK! Do it:
    a) after updating the bios it is recommended to restore the bios and restart the battery;
    a.1) access the bios and press f9. Then click on save and disconnect;
    a.2) then restart the battery:
    okay i'll try it
  • aphanic
    aphanic Member Posts: 959 Seasoned Specialist WiFi Icon
    Suvan said:
    @aphanic so how do we actually downgrade?Is there a guide somewhere?

    Sorry for the delay, today was hectic at work and had little time to be around here. Downgrading is "easy", when you try to upgrade to a certain version the program decompresses all of the files in a folder in %Temp%. That folder is deleted along with everything it holds when the program is closed, but because the program shows you an error message it won't close until you want it to.

    So 1st you have to copy all of those files out of there, and the one you're interested in is generally the one configuring the Windows side of the firmware upgrade, platform.ini in this case (and not platorms.ini, even though they're the same).

    That file is well commented throughout, but you don't want to mess with things that don't concern you, specially since none of this is intended for the average Joe.

    The first thing I'd look at is how the upgrade is actually performed, for example, is there any ME code? Not for this laptop, sadly, even though there is an upgrader for that part of the firmware present (FWUpdLcl.exe) to this day there wasn't any firmware upgrade that updated that part of the code. It won't get used either, you can see upgrading ME is disabled in that file too. That's important because something generally unknown is that ME code has some anti-rollback feature that is enabled sometimes and prevents you to go back to X release for security reasons.

    But I digress, first is looking at how the procedure is done, because sometimes not all parts of the firmware are updated and only part of it, going back to an earlier release is trickier then and I wouldn't probably be allowed to provide details of it under ACUA.

    This section is you're looking for:
    [ForceFlash]
ALL=1
...
    That shows you all of the firmware file will be flashed, in essence, everything will be erased and replaced by the contents of the release.

    A bit below that section you can see that only the BIOS will be upgraded by the release, no EC code was touched nor anything else:
    [Region]
BIOS=1
GbE=0
ME=0
EC=0
DESC=0
Platform_Data=0
    So, knowing that all of the firmware is replaced by whatever revision is bundled there, you just need to allow the Windows pre-flasher to proceed even if the version you're going to is lower.

    The easiest way is by disabling BIOS version checks:
    [Bios_Version_Check]
Flag=0		;[nb4] for Formal

...

[BIOSVersionFormat]
;[nb4-version] +
BIOSVFEnable=0
VersionFormat=XD.DD
    Although changing the flags should suffice I also replaced the comparison format for good measure, just in case.

    The process is usually automated, one double clicks the Windows part of the flasher and it goes on its own, but because I changed it so that it could go to a previous version I'd rather the user be conscious about it, so I enabled the confirmation dialog which is usually disabled:
    [UI]
Confirm=1               ;[nb4-flash]
...
ConfirmInfo=1
ConfirmInfoRDate=1
    And that's it, those are the only changes I did to the archive I attached in a post above.

    All of the security measures remain in place, so you won't be able to flash the firmware if you're not connected to the AC adapter for example, or if the BIOS file has been tampered with in any way, it has to be an official release or else it would fail signature checks later on (if not in the Windows program already).

    When one has access to the machine there are certainly other ways to go about changing the firmware it is running on, and for added security one could even dump the SPI ROM chip contents prior to the change, including parts not present in the upgrades we're given, but for this particular laptop, for this particular release, that is all that's needed.

    I think it does it on its own the re-loading the defaults in the firmware settings menu once the flashing is done, but it would be recommended since you're going back in case something changed.

    For example, menu-wise in 1.11 I think it was where the SATA operation mode was still visible without the need for Ctrl+S. If one were to revert back to that revision (I haven't checked whether the same procedure would apply or not, this is purely hypothetical) reloading the defaults would be recommended.

    Even if you then change things, for example I'd rather my F keys act as F keys and not media keys, or I like to have the F12 boot menu enabled; there could be newer things added that were unsupported back then.

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