Precision M4300 Issues

My son has an M4300 about a year old. Two issues have appeared:

1. When on battery, his Broadcom NIC is not seen - it does not show up in the Device Manager. When on AC, it shows up.

2. He installed the latest BIOS (A12). However, he cannot delete the downloaded installation file - it says the file is in use.

Anyone else run into these problems?


Also FWIW, I now see where the M4300 is on the list of laptops affected by the Nvidia graphics card problem

Thanks,
Harvey

 

For #1, I would boot the computer (on battery) and get into the bios by hitting F2. From there, I think there's an option called onboard devices. Make sure the nic is enabled.
For #2, here's what I usually do. From the desktop, go to Start Menu>run. Type in 'cmd' without the quotes and hit enter. Now, hit ctrl-alt-delete and go to the processes tab. End the explorer.exe process. Now, you should just have the black command prompt window. In that window, type in 'del' without the quotes and then the path of the file. For example, if you saved it to the desktop, it would look like this:

del "C:\documents and settings\username\desktop\blahblah.exe"

..replacing 'username' with your username and replacing 'blahblah' with the name of the file. Then hit enter.
To open explorer back up, hit ctrl-alt-delete again, click file>new task, and enter explorer.exe.

Sorry if this sounds complex, but it's really not as bad as it sounds.
Good luck.

 

O.K. He solved #2 with the delete file utility in HiJackThis.

#1 turned out to be a relatively well known problem with Dell Quickset. He had disabled it and that was causing the problem. If he let it run or removed it (Add/Remove), the NIC was recognized under battery. He chose to remove it completely.

Thanks,
Harvey

 

Oh, I see. Yes, as much as I enjoy disabling startup entries to make the computer run faster, quickset is one thing I just can't disable. Glad you got it fixed.