And, as I found out when trying to just shut the machine off, it will no do that as well. It powers down and the sides go bright white and the fans stay running. I hate to hold in the power button as well. NONE of these issues happened under A06, NONE.

I WISH I could downflash BACK to A06

How about some support from Dell and helping to do this.. PLEASE !

It doesn't seem you can actually fix A07 and A08 when the same problems exist in both

Yeah seems not only X51 they   up. I had issues with Aurora R4 latest bios also. They keep saying my configuration is wrong bla la bla. It is working as it should on previous bios but not this new bios. Also i cant blackflash to earlier version of bios.. Can you backflash your x51?

All of these "new" bios issues are being escalated. I do not know of any way to downflash.

Are you kidding me? These are not dated yesterday, and I have no faith in Dell making this right of fixing it. How do you send out 2 broken Bios's with the same problem. who is checking this? IS anyone checking? You control the Motherboards in these, how do you   up 2 Bios's and say they are recommended to install?

Wow. Geez. I was fuming at the malfunction of sleep & hibernate with A07, but it looks like A08 is worse. Chris M, I appreciate your working with customers here and in PM and all, but it was a long time ago that we PM'd about the sleep/hibernate issue, after I posted in the forum. How can Dell put A08 in action without fixing this very well know problem?

After the first round of furious posting about problems on the forum, criticisms have died down lately. Why shoot yourself on the foot again with A08, and put all the anger back in headlines? Would have been much better fixing all the problems and delaying A08. Is engineering on this? (Is PR on this, even?)

Just for balance, I've just completed a successful upgrade from Win7 to Win8, and apart from some minor non-Dell issues, my system is running sweetly.

My X51 when on Win7 Ultimate was on BIOS A07 with the HDD replaced with a Samsung 830 SSD, the GTX555 replaced with an EVGA 670GTX FTW and finally the WiFi swapped out for an Intel 6235 (please Dell stop using dreadful Broadcom rubbish for WiFi). I also have a Logitech G19 keyboard, G930 headset and G300 mouse (all three connected to the back and working as expected, even in the BIOS). The Intel HD is my primary adapter and I'm connected to a Samsung D8000 TV via the HDMI on the main board.

It's now on Win8 Pro after performing an upgrade, keeping everything that was there before - yes people this works and if you understood the changes MS made to Win7 then you'd know why an upgrade is no longer as bad as it used to be.  It took about 20min to upgrade from a USB stick, with a further 30min to download and apply nearly 1GB of WIndows Updates, plus updates to various drivers (Realtek, Intel Wifi, Intel HD). I also removed the unnecessary USB3 drivers from Win7 as Win8 supports it natively now. The nVidia card retained the 310.54 drivers from Win7.

I only have one niggle mentioned briefly above, and that's the fact that Logitech still haven't gotten off their lazy backsides and released a Win8 compatible version of their gaming software. The headset and keyboard are fine, but the extra buttons on the mouse won't program :-(

Totally happy with my X51 - thank you Dell for an awesome system.

Taomyn: can your machine sleep/hibernate and wake up?

Mine came with A07 and now has an *beta* A08 that I obtained from Chris M  maybe a month ago, in an effort to cure the sleep/hibernate problem. It did not fix the problem. Now people with official A08 are reporting the same problem.

Other than that, the machine worked in both Window 7 and now Windows 8.

Taomyn: can your machine sleep/hibernate and wake up?

Normally I would hesitate to test out something for someone else, I like to help out, but in this case I'm not confident to do so.

Why? Because my 1st gen M17x trashed 3 OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs because I was using slee[p/hibernate before I reverted back to an HDD. Even the 4th RMA sent by OCZ that I sold to a friend with a home built desktop system died the same way - he inadvertently slept his system. There were hundreds of reports of this on the OCZ forums but they did almost nothing to resolve it, hence 4 dead drives.

Now my Samsung is no OCZ junk, but I really don't want to risk a borked system - I always shut down fully as I've no need like my laptop to revert back to what I was running before, and it's almost as quick to fully start anyway.

Interesting thread! I use 3 X-51 at home, 2 were bought in August 2012 and one in November 2012.

All systems run Windows 8 Pro (Updated from Windows 7)

The August systems were delivered with BIOS A03 which I now updated to A06 (based on info in this thread).

Now to the non-boring info: The November system was shipped with BIOS A08 pre-installed and even after the upgrade to Windows 8 Pro I don't have any of the problems mentioned above. Sleep / Hibernate / Wake works fine, shutdown too (even though this takes a few extra seconds to fully power the system down after the screens go dark).

TechPreacher: thanks for the info. It could be that production A08 (as vs. the beta A08 on my machine) is good for at least some machines. If new shipments work, but older X51's doesn't work even after A08 upgrade, then there must be some hardware changes that made new shipments work--in which case those with older X51's such as I will have to call tech support.

I checked downloads for the X51 and A08 is not available yet. I'll try that as soon as it becomes available. Does anybody have the upgrade for download yet?

I just noticed that BIOS A10 is up for download on the Dell support site. Has anyone dared to try?

I'll definitely try it, but there's a problem with download. With "Single File Download", you get a error page. And I don't want to install the Dell Download Manager.  Has anybody been able to get past this?

Oh for crying out loud Dell, get your act together. This happens _every_ time you release new downloads.

@Chris is it really beyond the capabilities of your staff to set the site up so that files are listed when they are actually available. It's not rocket science!

+1. I'm eager to download this to see if it fixes my Sleep/Wake issue..........................

I submitted feedback through the Download site so hopefully they see that the link is broken and correct it soon.