Earlier today, I attempted to update my BIOS to the latest version that Dell provides me with. My system doesn't suspend correctly, and this was an attempt at covering all my bases that Adam suggested in this bug report. Alas, it didn't work - my system still doesn't suspend correctly. Nevertheless, it did take me on a wild goose chase to figure out how to actually update the BIOS since I lack a Windows installation on my system.

What appeared to be the easiest way was using System Rescue CD. This didn't work for me somehow. I don't have any blank CDs around, and it wouldn't boot from the USB that I created. I looked around to try and use it directly with Grub2, but it booted up a linux distribution while I need FreeDOS. I tussled a little with it and then gave up. I decided to use a FreeDOS live cd. Here's a blog post where Derek's created an image that you can simply dd on to your USB. It worked like a charm.

In a sentence: download the image, extract it from the bz2 archive, dd it to your pen drive, copy the BIOS exe file to it, reboot, run the BIOS update.

Simple isn't it? Yup.