I've been building and repairing computers as a hobby since 2004; I had tried a new battery, I had tried different RAM modules, I mentioned in my post that the blink code was referencing a ram module but it was a strange error considering it only happened when I tried to update the BIOS. Immediately after trying to update the BIOS would be the diagnostic code for the ram.  [IMAGE]   [IMAGE]   The culprit is this poorly placed strip of material, it was placed over the event holes right over the ram modules; removing it allowed my BIOS to update and now I have no problems. 
I have a latitude 5400 that will not turn on unless I follow the procedure to do the RTC reset by holding the power button for 20 seconds while device powered off. Specifically I push the power button and sometimes the fan will kick on more often it will not, the keyboard will light up, the power button will light up, the screen will not light up, and it will sit in that state indefinitely, until I hit the power button in which case you can hear the fan kick to full speed and then the machine turns off. So I will hold the power button until I see the two white flashes at the front in which it does whatever it does and then it boots to the Dell logo screen   This will let me hit f12 to open the one time boot menu screen, or f10 for bios Every single time I complains about the date and time not being set, assumably because of the rtc reset.  F1 from this error screen continues to the one time boot (as long as I tapped f12 at Dell logo) The hard drive has an issue, the problem persists with the hard drive disconnected Entering the bios setup is possible but none of the settings will persist to the next boot in which I have to rtc reset. I can add UEFI entries, they do not persist If I try to update bios from the f12 screen, it will show me a window that lets me choose a file, I've tried the 1.5.1 and the 1.12.1 files, the laptop will go to reboot to install the firmware but instead of black screen appears and it starts having an LED diagnostic code of two orange three white, which I think is can't find ram That diagnostic code will continue to flash until I do the RTC reset again. This happens every single time I try to do the BIOS update.  I cannot get the laptop to boot into BIOS recovery (I somehow was able to get the BIOS file not found LED flashing code at one point but I could not get that to appear again)   Running the machine diagnostics from the one-time boot menu indicates that everything is fine except for the hard drive which just doesn't seem to be able to finish the test with no real error or indication as to why. I have not yet tried a new hard drive as the problem still exists without a hard drive connection.  I've tried to install an OS, such as Windows or Linux, but so far, every time the computer reboots I have to do the RTC reset and every time I do the RTC reset it doesn't have any uefi-enabled boot partitions listed. It won't save any bios settings that I try to set, and it flashes the two three error code when trying to use the internal flashing mechanism. I think it was improperly provisioned; I received it second hand with no information of the previous owner. Service tag   
5400 need to reset rtc every time, cannot update bios