I recently had an issue with some of the machines at work. Hyper-threading and other settings were not enabled before when our contractors set up the PCs. It was something that was not mentioned to them and unfortunately, I don’t want to go through each machine to enable some of these settings.
I had to look for a solution and luckily there was one!
Dell Client Command Suite is a suite of management applications that work with Dell devices. Specifically, I found and used the Dell Command | Configure application. This allowed me to reconfigure our BIOS via a executable with ease.
Installation was easy, I downloaded the Dell Command | Configure app from here and selected the Windows installer. Once installed, I launched the application and was greeted by this screen.
There are four different sections you can access. The first section is the Create Multiplatform Package section. You can select specific BIOS settings you want that should carry over to other Dell products when the program runs.
The second section is create a package based upon settings that are on the Local System. The computer I ran these from had specific bios settings enabled and it could create an executable that could run on other similar machines.
The third option is to open a saved package (.CCTX file extension or the exported configuration). Finally, the fourth option is to view the Package History, which will show you all the packages that were created.
So back to my problem. I had to set up a bunch of dell laptops to have hyperthreading enabled. To do this, I went to the Create Multiplatform Package and typed in the search bar Hyperthreading. It led me to two specific BIOS Settings, logiproc and speedstep. Logiproc enables or disables Hyperthreading and SpeedStep allows me to set it to either Automatic, Disable, Maximum Performance or Maximum Battery. I selected Enabled and Automatic as seen below and clicked on Export EXE.
Once I click on Export EXE, I’m given the options to input a Setup, System or Hard Disk Drive password. If you don’t have this enabled, click Ok to continue. Otherwise, ,make sure you set the correct password for the BIOS Settings to be set on the Dell computer/laptop. This is the password that was set on the BIOS before.
After that, save the file somewhere and let it run on the computer to see if it works.
Exporting the file also creates a shell script as well that you can run on a Linux machine. In my case, since these machines are running Windows, all I had to do is run the executable. After it runs, it will generate a text file based upon the file name you set it as. It will display whether or not the changes were successful, so it’s a good indicator if it worked or not. In my testing, I had to restart at least two times to make sure everything worked properly.
So you may be thinking, having the executable is nice but I still have to go to every computer. In my situation, we use Altiris DS 6.9, so I ran a job to copy the executable over to the computer and a script to run the bios setting executable afterwards. I also ran a script to Restart the machine and then have it Get Inventory to verify if the Core Count changed from 2 to 4. And it worked!
So if you ever have the problem of changing a specific BIOS setting for a lot of Dell Computers, Dell Command | Configure is a great application to use for this purpose.
