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How to update BIOS in Dell laptop?
An earlier link in AskUbuntu sheds some light on how to do this, but I found with my recently-purchased Dell Inspiron 7520 none of the published methods worked. I am therefore posting this to record my experience in the hope that others find it useful for BIOS upgrades on Dell hardware post-2010 (approximately), and maybe for other makes of computer as well.
The approximate date of 2010 relates to the last active date of the unofficial Dell support sites referred to in the above link, but in some cases the sell-by date on the web information may be as early as 2008.
First, it is important to have a good reason to mess around with the BIOS. In my case, I had an issue with the behaviour of certain USB devices using the USB3 ports. Shortly after I purchased the machine, a BIOS upgrade was published by Dell, which was said to address some issues with the USB3 ports.
The BIOS upgrade was published by Dell as a Windows executable, so of course my question is how to run it on an Ubuntu box which had been purged of all things Microsoft.
The methods referred to above mostly depend on being able to create a DOS-like environment using FreeDOS, or on using obsolete Dell scripts to download and install header files. I found that running the .exe file under most forms of DOS (including FreeDOS and MS-DOS) just produced a brief message saying 'Test.'. I found that the methods relying on Dell scripts did not work, either due to obsolete code, or because of out-of-date repositories.
So, how do we do this?
