Thank you I will give that a try and report back.

Ok I can get the computer to run by resetting cmos jumper. If I press F1 the computer starts and runs just fine but hangs on restart. If I press F2 and enter bios the computer will not start when I exit.

Did you replace CMOs battery with a brand new one?  When bios is acting weird on old pc always good idea to do so.

Yes and when I tested it the old battery was dead. This is what led to the problem I'm having now. The date and time need to be set in bios is the message at startup and I get the option to press F1 or F2. F1 will load default settings and the computer boots right into windows. F2 enters bios where I can set the time and date but when I save and exit  the computer hangs at the bios loading screen. I only get the F1 F2 option if I clear the cmos with the jumper on the mb.

A11 is the latest iirc.  Did you reset jumper after you replace CMOs battery w a brand new one?  It does not hurt to reset jumper one more time while you have the new CMOs battery in now.

Should you decide to reflash bios, these steps from a Dell guru’s guide may help to backup a current bios image first,

Even though Dell has their own image, using AMI's BIOS utility to do a full backup of all memory blocks was the best option 

Step 1) find /amibios/afuwin/64/

Step 2) Run the program for your OS:

AFUWINx64.exe (64-bit)

Step 3) Simply click the "SAVE" button, and save the ROM to a file.

You have now backed up every bit of your bios by every memory block individually. Copy this file to a USB stick or something external to your machine (if it fails).

Flash bios

Step 1) Close and restart the AMI Flash utility, as outlined above in Backing up.

Step 2) Click the "OPEN" button and select the BIN (the actual BIN file that extracted from the Dell bios exe).

Step 3) Click the Setup tab in the flash utility.

Step 4) Take a deep breath, exhale (cause it will take longer than you can hold your breath), and press the "FLASH" button.

It sounds like you cannot update time date successfully in bios after pressing F2.  I will just leave it since you can still press F1 and launch Windows.  A possible solution but risky move is to update bios.  With the old x58 board of A51 R1, flash bios can potentially fail and brick the board.  Which bios version are you on now?

Re: press F1 then hangs on restart

Do you mean on restart it stalls a5 Dell logo and no longer responds?  No more prompt for F1 or F2?

do you have a lot of usb devices connected to pc?  Try disconnect all usb devices and see if changes restart behavior.

I only get the F1 option one time, if I tell the computer to restart from the start menu in windows 10 it will hang every time when the bios is loading otherwise the computer is running good.

I've contemplated reflashing the bios as a last resort, I'm well aware of the dangers as I have updated the bios on almost every Dell computer I own if one was offered by Dell during its life span. I'm on A11 and when the bios is loading at startup the option for F1 and F12 are available and will light up when selected but nothing ever launches. I have eliminated all usb devices except for the Alienware keyboard and mouse. I may eliminate those and use the mouse and keyboard ports just to see if it makes a difference.

Where things stand at the moment, the computer will boot and run if I reset with the cmos jumper on the motherboard and choose F1 when prompted. Yesterday I used an Alienware program to check the cmos and it passed so I went ahead and re-flashed the bios but nothing has changed. Problem seems to be somewhere in the startup process just haven't found it yet. I'll continue to use the computer using this method to boot as the computer runs fine once in windows. I was in the process of converting this computer to air cooling and everything was rocking when disaster struck. Forgetting simple things such as the cmos battery on a ten year old computer is a learning experience, yeah that's the ticket.