17 R5, BIOS 1.5.1 update breaks Vive

And I am a bit confused. Is the system tracking both controllers now that you rolled back the BIOS?

It's a Alienware 17 r5, supposedly VR ready. One issue is the Vive won't work plugged into the right hand USB port, never did. Only the left. The Vive was working (using the left port) until the end of November bios update. Then one controller would always work for a few seconds and then quit. The other controller would continue to track. Vive  support tried having me reinstall USB drivers, bluetooth, reinstall steamvr, reset the controller, everything. I ended up sending on Vive back, only to have the same thing happen with the replacement. Rolling back the bios seemed to do the trick. I would like to continue updating my bios, but have no idea if the new one has a setting causing the problem, or how to even notify Dell since Vive isn't a widely used piece of equipment.

We have exactly the same issue here with 20 Alienware laptops and 20 Vive to be delivered to our clients. The BIOS shipped with the laptops have versions 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 which showed the exact same issue where one controller stops tracking after a few seconds, and there's more: the built-in Bluetooth had to be disabled in order to setup Vive from the beginning, and half the time Vive HMD will not show anything except lighting up with the uniform grey backdrop. But occasionally Vive does function well. It took us almost a week to figure it all out, which is very ironic because the Alienware is supposed to be "VR Ready", at one point we were seriously considering to return all of them. We rolled back the BIOS on one of the laptops to 1.2.1 and so far it seems OK but still need more testing to be 100% sure.

Dell please escalate this and release ASAP a new BIOS that fix everything.

Unfortunately further testing showed even after the BIOS downgrade, VIVE still struggled to work. Specifically, there seems to be a conflict between the on-board audio device and VIVE audio, and by simply switching from one to the other while SteamVR is running (not even running any simulations other than SteamVR home) causes the controller to stop tracking immediately. It seems by setting the system default audio device to VIVE will make it more stable, but from time to time VIVE will stop working after fresh boot/reboot, and the VIVE bluetooth device will show a warning sign in the Device Manager, and it's very difficult to get it working when that happens, typically requires purge and reinstall all VIVE drivers several times. Overall it's too much hassle and we ended up returning all 20 laptops purchased for a big project.

Also it's ridiculous that the laptop only comes with 2 USB ports, not enough to run Oculus Rift which needs 3.

It's so ironic that the "VR ready" laptop is not ready for the two most popular VR headsets on the market....

We went with a newer model fro MSI in the end.

It was brought to my attention, Thanks Chris M, that no one tried the newest BIOS which is 1.6.2. Has anyone tried the newest BIOS to see if there is an improvement?