I recently noticed at a clients that their Dell laptops appear to have SMART disabled in bios by default. I noticed this while swapping out a disk on a desktop which had failed without any warning.. wonder why we didn't get anything. :-)
Anyone know how to script bios changes on Dell machines? Is it even possible?
This particular client has loads of laptops and maybe 50-75% of the company will be out of the office on any given day - making updating this difficult and expensive - unless I can script it.
The dell site mentions an openmanage package which they offer/sell, but that looks like overkill for such a simple need.
What Dell has for this is the Dell Client Configuration Utility, which gives you the option to configure bios changes (either for a single model or multiple models, and whatever doesn't apply to that bios is skipped), and then package it in an msi for silent/unattended deployment to the workstation, a reboot is still required though.
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/w/wiki/2545.aspx