Flashing Your Bios ? ? ?

[FIREWALL]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Yep, 5 1/4". When it really was a 'floppy' disc.

And Firewall, I'm glad you like your fun, but around here you never know for sure...

Ain't that the truth. :p

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by bert8for3

:rotfl: been there done that for sure. 5 1/4 (was it 1/4?) inch floppy discs. Remember those? I had to use a 3 1/2 (1/2?) floppy the other day to pull something off an old laptop, had a hard time remembering which way to put it in and that it read as A drive.

I've still got some in the loft off one of my earlier rigs. A real racer it was in it's day....a Pentium 333Mhz 16MB memoty and a 1.5GB HD.

You could use them now for beer mats :rotfl:

[FIREWALL]

Originally Posted by danlisa

1.44 Floppy that used to start you PC for you.

However, Steve's was probably a cartridge.:rotfl:

Anyway, flashing your BIOS is fairly easy these days. Usually your MOBO comes with a set of PC tools. My ASUS does. One of these utilities is a BIOS flashing program which backups your current BIOS and then downloads the correct one for your MOBO. It will then flash it for you upon shutdown/restart.

That said, unless you are specifically experiencing trouble that is attributed to your BIOS being dated, don't do it.

My mobo is a 2004 GT Edition. (see sig) It came with a cd and a manual. Strolling thru the manual I didn't see any reference to "flashing the bios.

Any thoughts on this. Oh btw the reason for this is I upgraded cpu, 2 gigs of ram and vid card.

[bert8for3]

All the time spent (wasted?) trying to tweak autoexec.bat and config.sys and clear out a few more available bytes in the first 640K. What a pain!

[FIREWALL]

Originally Posted by FIREWALL

My mobo is a 2004 GT Edition. (see sig) It came with a cd and a manual. Strolling thru the manual I didn't see any reference to "flashing the bios.

Any thoughts on this. Oh btw the reason for this is I upgraded cpu, 2 gigs of ram and vid card.

:bump

[fatty]

Originally Posted by bert8for3

You have to get a raincoat and then stand on a corner and then someone walks by and ...

I apologize ... I couldn't resist :rotfl:

edit: kidding aside, those links that jimbuna posted are interesting ... I've always wanted to try it, imagining some outstanding performance gain, but as one article says, I've always been way to scared to try it (and still am). If you try it, let us know how it goes.

BIOS updates rarely give substantial performance updates unless you have previously unsupported hardware that was introduced in the BIOS. Unless the changelogs indicate something you really want... better to not fix it if it ain't broke.

On a sidenote, Vista makes it pretty easy to swap out your BIOS now. You do it right in the OS and don't even need a bootable diskette. It's great.

[geetrue]

My polish sonar Chief Ostroski always said, "If it works ... don't fix it"

[peterloo]

In the past, you need to create a DOS boot disc, along with the flashing program and new bios into it, get into bios, and execute the flashing programme. I've tried once for my BIOS and one for my DVD firmware. Now, you might be able to do it in Windows (for some models)

You need to wait a minute or so in order to let the programme write the new bios into it

To successfully do so, first, you must make sure that you have a good power supply (insert charged battery for notebooks so that the flashing process continues even when the external power is down) Also, be careful! One of my friend accidentally kicked the reboot button of his desktop when he was burning a disk, resulting the loss of a CD-Rom. If this happens when you flash, you know it hurts...

secondly, use a brand new floppy. (this has killed many green motherboard flashers) Don't use the old ones, since they probably contain bad sectors. Purchase one is a smart idea. Scan for the existance of bad sectors before you try using a old floppy (Bad sector infested floppy = a paper full of holes. The computer writes on it, not knowing the existance of these holes, but they will know when it tries to read it later and finds something goes wrong...)

Finally, get the right bios. Download them only in the official sites. Make sure the flashing ulity is of the same version and the bios fits your motherboard. Check the model number carefully as different motherboard has different flashing methods.

Last but not least, better safe then sorry. Don't flash unless it is totally necessary (say, there is a serious bug)

If you get into trouble, you can ask your retailer to fix it for you (yes, they can since they have got special tools to do it) but it costs.

p.s. Flashing the bios, being an advanced stuff, usually does not appear on your user manual. Some might mention it, through.