I'll try to keep this short. I'm the second owner of an Inspiron 530 (the full-size one, not the "s") -- service tag DBSSNG1. I use several computers for audio editing. I need the blue line-input jack to work. I was getting distorted audio and no remedy was helping (yes, I posted that question to the audio forum, but we're past that point now)
Further inspection revealed that my system BIOS is version 1.0.18. When you enter my service tag #, the only BIOS they show for this unit is 1.0.1. !!! When you then ask the page to show you "all downloads available for this model" instead of just the ones specific to my service tag, it shows a few other choices for the BIOS, one of which is 1.0.18. So apparently this computer has been flashed with the wrong BIOS.
(Which makes sense -- because my line-in problem is such that the input faders are actually greyed-out and non-functional, both in Windows Record Volume and in the Realtek manager. That can't be a software issue. Especially since, when I threw in an Avance sound card I had lying around, I got the same results there.)
Again, I know this isn't the "sound" forum, but as I say we're past that now. I need to revert my BIOS to 1.0.1. And of course, when I download the executable file on the downloads page it won't do it. It won't flash a BIOS with a version number that's lower than the one you already have.
How can I get a "flashable" version of 1.0.1? This issue was actually addressed in the forums a couple of years back -- there were people who wanted to go back to 1.0.15 and 1.0.12 -- but the links that were provided in the answers don't exist anymore. Dell has removed those BIOS files, it would seem. I even scoured Dell's entire BIOS FTP page -- which I was kinda surprised that you can actually do -- and they're not there.
Now what?