BIOS repair weirdness

The keyboard stopped working on my E6500, so I sent it back to Dell, who promptly replaced the keyboard and sent it back to me. Everything is working fine, but one strange thing has happened--the BIOS on it has gone from A14 (what I'd upgraded it to) down to A12 (what it originally came with).

Why would they mess with the BIOS when repairing a keyboard?

 

check if you still have the same service tag on your bios, box and chassis
check if you have the same serial number ;-)

 

The motherboard may have been the reason your keyboard stopped working!

 

Definitely the same service tag-- and the chassis has the same little scratches in the same places as it did before I shipped it...

In the work order sheet that was sent along the laptop, they didn't write anything about replacing the motherboard; just the keyboard.

 

If I'm not mistaken, every time I've flashed the BIOS on my E6400, it's done something to the keyboard firmware as well. I assume they felt like they needed to do something to the keyboard firmware and subsequently flashed your BIOS to A12. Maybe your keyboard firmware revision has to match your BIOS revision? And then if the keyboard they had was an A12 keyboard... well you see where this is going.

Regardless, this is just speculation.