Getting rid of Computrace on Dell Inspiron mini 10v (Inspiron 1011)

Today I just received my very small and not so shiny Dell Inspiron mini 10v (1011 model). I will possibly make a review later if there is enough popular demand

Playing with the BIOS I activated « Computrace » to see what it means, thinking that it was some sort of TPM module. What a mess !! I didn’t pay attention at all that this setting could not be changed later… or could it ?

Do the following at your own risk of course …

I grabbed a bootdisk (floppy image) with Dell utilities on it (especially ASSET.COM and EE-VALUE.EXE)

(Google is your friend, don’t even try to ask about any non-opensource download here…)

After some fight with those utilities I finally found how to change Service Tag and Asset Tag from my small laptop. I read posts on different forums that it should be enough to reset Computrace but it wasn’t …

So to change Service Tag use

ASSET /S /D (to delete and set it up again in the BIOS menu) or

ASSET /S NEWTAG

Depending on asset version it should work flawlessly, I tried ASSET_A209.EXE and it didn’t work for me (an old version did)

Use similar commands without /S to change Asset Tag.

But the trickiest part was to deactivate the damn Computrace module in BIOS.

This time we would use EE-VALUE that allows to set a value directly on the BIOS NVRAM (not sure about CMOS of NVRAM but anyways…) and looking at different values I finally found (using EE-VALUE /D to display contents) that there was a strange value at offset 0×50.

Using

EE-VALUE /W=50,FF

will reset it to default and then you will be able to select or disable it again.

If you have any doubt or if you have a different laptop check first with

EE-VALUE /D

and try to find any « 03″ (activated) or strange value around 0×50.

Very strong protection from Absolute Software guys ! It takes seconds to remove once your laptop has been stolen, very efficient …

I had this error for a long time before discovering I could do it directly with EE-VALUE so I put it here for indexing purposes :

SVCTAG.EXE version 3.3

I told you what I am. But what are you?

EE-CPB.exe: Error 0

Now, then I’m going back to my fresh Slackware 13.0 install again. Thanks for reading and I hope this will help people with Dell laptop to manage their « Computrace » settings like they want.