BIOS update killed my E521

Can anyone help me, I have a dell athlon amd 64 dual core processor 4400+, I recently went onto the dell website, and saw many things including my own dell support system telling me it is a good thing to keep bios updated..

so, I downloaded the update, it gave me a choice, vista 32 or vista 64, so I did some research, turns out the 64 seems to stand for 64 bit, so I downloaded the vista-64 version...I have home premier, and since I have an amd 64, that was how I made the choice..strange how they had my service tag, so they should have known which one I needed anyway before I even downloaded it..

unplugged everything, and ran it, it said ready to update from 1.18 to 1.11..it failed about 40 times before locking up the system, and then it never booted back up..

kind of strange how dell updates worked fine until my warrant ran out last month, now they kill my computer, and expect me to pay $40.00 to talk to someone, and if it is hardware, which it sure seems like, then I am out $40.00 and we start over..

can anyone save me from the dell run around and just tell me what to do, is it dead or what?

and why does dell have things on the website your not supposed to download anyway? the guy on the phone from dell support said I should not have downloaded it, is that correct? dell has updates that we are not supposed to download? how do I know which updates I am supposed to download? and even more important, how do I know which updates I am not supposed to download, like the guy from dell told me, he did not seem to have an answer..

please help, desperate..

Todd