TL:DR - BOLDED
I've never really bothered learning much about updating the BIOS, because I've needed to up to this point. Now, I have two laptops where the manufacturer does NOT supply BIOS updates (Compal KHLB2, Clevo W230SS). I had always assumed that a BIOS is system specific, and that if the manufacturer does not have an update, one does not exist. However, after messing around with CPU-z, there is a BIOS update utility where I can what I assume to be a generic BIOS update.
What I'm interested in knowing is should a trust a 3rd party BIOS update utility since the manufacturers of my laptops don't offer BIOS updates directly? Because both these laptops seem to have issues that a BIOS update might fix
As for issues, if you're curious, is that the Compal laptop takes forever to POST - it can literally boot to the Windows desktop from the boot manager faster than it can POST. As for my Clevo, the headphone jack seems to not want to output sound every once in a while - this has happened on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, with and without the Realtek driver. I couldn't find a solution to the problem outside of a hard reboot. Even a proper reboot doesn't fix it - it has to be a hard shut off to restore my headphone jack.