How to prevent 1.4.4 BIOS update 17R3?

Hello,

Unfortunately, there's no way to stop the Bios update notification since the system will always detect an older version running and the updates are recommended. If the notification comes up, you can just ignore it. If the update runs automatically, you can always downgrade your Bios by following the steps on  this video.

Do you have Dell Support Assist installed? That will constantly nag you about new drivers and or bios updates.  

Unfortunately if it's already started the bios update then it is going to install it the next time you restart your computer and i don't think there is any way around that.  

@Alienware - Rodrigo is correct that you can downgrade the bios after the upgrade, UNLESS this bios that is being installed is protected which a lot of the more recent ones were because they contained patches for the Spectre/Meltdown bugs that you couldn't just uninstall as they made micro code changes.  

To my knowledge, Windows Update only pushes BIOS updates for Microsoft Surface laptops, so messing with Active Hours won't directly affect BIOS updating on an Alienware system, except for avoiding a reboot that might cause some other action to be taken, I guess. If you want to opt out of certain updates and Dell's applications don't give you a way to manually hide them, then it might be easier to just switch Dell Update and/or Dell SupportAssist to manual update checks only.  Based on your post, you sound like the, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" type rather than the "I always want the latest and greatest" type, so you might find you even prefer performing the occasional manual update check with the opportunity to read the release notes for each updates and then manually deselect a specifically undesired update each time it's offered -- all without risk of having it update behind your back.  Or of course just uninstall those apps entirely and manually visit support.dell.com once in a while.

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@jphughanwrote:

To my knowledge, Windows Update only pushes BIOS updates for Microsoft Surface laptops, so messing with Active Hours won't directly affect BIOS updating on an Alienware system, except for avoiding a reboot that might cause some other action to be taken, I guess. If you want to opt out of certain updates and Dell's applications don't give you a way to manually hide them, then it might be easier to just switch Dell Update and/or Dell SupportAssist to manual update checks only.  Based on your post, you sound like the, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" type rather than the "I always want the latest and greatest" type, so you might find you even prefer performing the occasional manual update check with the opportunity to read the release notes for each updates and then manually deselect a specifically undesired update each time it's offered -- all without risk of having it update behind your back.  Or of course just uninstall those apps entirely and manually visit support.dell.com once in a while.

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I explained in my original post:

• I thought I had removed/disabled Support Assist, but it seemed to have been reactivated and was producing notifications.
• The Alienware 1.4.4 BIOS update had inserted itself in the queue to update next boot.
• Windows was ready to update and since this was Home Edition, a reboot was inevitable, and a side effect of that was that the BIOS update would initiate. This is nothing to do with Windows updating the BIOS.

In my case, to try to improve system reliability and stability I have removed pretty much every background process or server that I can, Support Assist being one of them. I never install the Nvidia GeForce Experience as it runs servers that I will never, ever use.

I have to visit Dell for manual updates anyway, as the Dell email notification system and Support Assist are both completely unreliable.

It isn't a case of being conservative about updates - my system has been appallingly bad from new, so updates are welcome and I always update the video, storage and I/O drivers as they become available, since the original ones were unusable.

In this case, it is knowing that there is a high risk of there being a problem with the 1.4.4 update, and the 1.4.4 update not being reversible. I'm happy to wait for a reliable fix.

I don't think I'm particularly at risk from Meltdown/Spectre (or at least, no more than others on slightly older systems that will never be patched) and the high possibility of there being issues or performance impacts concerns me, as it does others. Intel and AMD have handled this whole thing very badly.

I would go so far as to say I consider PCs to have gone backwards over the past few years, they are nowhere near as good as they should be.

Wonder if that iss what bricked my 15 R3, did a windows update and reboot but suspect it did a bios update as well.. now bricked.. oh joy..

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@Jumpy07 wrote:

Wonder if that iss what bricked my 15 R3, did a windows update and reboot but suspect it did a bios update as well.. now bricked.. oh joy..

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Windows update won't deal with the BIOS on Alienware, that is up to Alienware/Dell to handle. It is possible that you might have missed that Support Assist was going to update the BIOS, but I think that would be hard to do.