I got a Dell Mini 9 netbook on Wednesday, which is a lovely little machine (except the keyboard and the gloss screen, but they are liveable with).

Unfortunately through no fault of my own I managed to "brick" it within a couple of hours of it arriving. Rendered completely useless while doing a BIOS update.

I downloaded the Windows BIOS update tool from the Dell website. I ran the tool and up popped a window.

The window had a couple of text boxes, one for the path to the BIOS to apply and one for the path to backup the old BIOS to. It also had a button to press to start the update and a bunch of text. The text warned you to plug in the PSU and close other apps before running the update.

So I plugged in the PSU and went to alt-tab to close Firefox. I couldn't alt-tab though, the machine had hung.

Bother, I thought. I gave the machine a couple of minutes to see if it would recover. I tried resetting by holding down the power button, no response.

So I pulled the PSU and removed the battery. I plugged it again and turned it on.

Nothing. The power light lit, but nothing else happened.

I then embarked on a troubleshooting journey, removing miniPCIe cards, SSDs and RAM. To no avail, it was dead.

I began to wonder whether I had accidentally pressed "go" on the BIOS update app without realising it.

I reported it to Dell support, answering a few silly questions while pretending to do all the troubleshooting again, I arranged for it to be picked up for repair.

After that I decided to go and search out fellow Mini 9 owners. I found them at the excellent http://mydellmini.com/forum/

Some reading on their forum lead me to a shocking discovery. Despite the BIOS updates text boxes, warning text and start button, it actually starts the update process as soon as you open it. The update process takes 6-7 minutes.

So through no fault of my own I had started the BIOS update and pulled the plug on it part way through ! No wonder it was dead.

I can't understand how they can have decided to do such a stupid thing. I also can't understand why modern PCs can't have a similar failsafe approach to their BIOS updates as the empeg took years ago.

Rant over...