NOOB ISO Help Inspiron 1501 / Remove (shutoff) Computrace from BIOS

[stevennlv]

Hi everyone,

I know my way around a 'puter a little bit. But I'm a total newb at BIOS modification.

Here's my problem:
A few years ago (before we got together) my girl bought an AMD based Dell Inspiron 1501 with Phoenix BIOS and Vista. She thought that having Lo-Jack on it would be a good idea. Well, she was wrong.

Over the last several years I've had to reformat her system constantly because it keeps getting re-infected with every form of crap there is on the net.

I've been on XP since it came out and I have a ton of tools for it. I can't program at all, but if someone makes the tool I can use it. (And my XP system is very secure, I never get infected.) I got tired of messing around, so I rolled her system back to XP and using my tools and some research on the net I found that the problem is that Dell has used a chip on the motherboard made by Advantage to insert a rootkit in to any Windows install on the system. The rootkit hides the rpcnetp service.

I've tried every work-around that I've found on the net to no avail. Evidently just terminating the Window's Service that the Computrace software inserts in to the registry is not enough. I believe that the holes the rootkit creates in the registry allows other bad stuff in and gives it a hiding place. (Like that thing with the Sony CD's a few years back.)

So, after the most recent reformat (after I used the work around to disable the service) I manually dug through the registry and removed all references to rpcnetp. At which point the system suffered a crash I could not repair. It wouldn't even boot the OS.

So, I guess my only option is to remove / turn off Computrace from the BIOS. But, there's no option to do that. And even the folks at Advantage have told me that they cannot dial in and turn off the Computrace service.

I've dug through this site and a lot of others. But I'm still not certain what the solution to this problem is or how to do it if there is one.

The simplest solution for me would be if someone has re-written a BIOS executable that I can use to re-flash the BIOS with a version that will allow me to turn off Computrace.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

(And before I get flamed here like I did at a couple of other places that I've asked for help: The tech at Advantage CONFIRMED that their chip inserts a rootkit in to the system.)