Today I was prompted to restart my computer to update the software, turns out it at least part of it was a bios update.
As soon as I turned my laptop on, the fan started running at 100% and won't stop. I've rebooted it, I've got linux running alongside my windows 8.1 and it doesn't matter if I'm in windows or linux, the fan is going full blast. I just found out that in addition to that, windows doesn't recognize when my my charger is plugged in. It shows something like 246 days left on charge, but doesn't say that it's connected to charger.
No probem, I thought, I'll just re-flash the a9 bios firmware. Turns out that the bios software that can be downloaded from the dell support website checks to make sure the charger is plugged in before it will flash the bios, so I'm out of luck there. I really don't want to mess around with alternative methods of flashing my bios because of the risk involved, if my bios gets more messed up I'm going to be SOL.
I'm really pretty upset about this, I paid just shy of $1000 for this laptop maybe a year and a week ago. I take excellent care of it, I'm a computer science major so I need it for school and use it every day. It's the Inspiron 15 inch 7000 series. Does anyone know of a way to flash an older bios version without using the dell .exe? Or maybe of a way to disable it's charger checking?