Demystifying BIOS updates - The DOs and DO NOTs

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Some of this advice is overly-cautious ...

When there?s a darn good reason for doing the update (as a rule I find that if I buy a cutting-edge board then there can be a lot of BIOS updates released over a short period of time, and many of these can be critical updates - the pain of being at the cutting edge!)

Even older motherboards can get a little extra life out of them with a new BIOS. Definitely do some research on what you're going to gain, but BIOS updates don't necessarily have to be an "only if something's broken" situation anymore.

"... never, ever, update the BIOS from within Windows."

This, to me, is kind of old-school advice. I've found newer Windows-based BIOS updaters to be about as stable and more friendly to use than DOS-based updaters. YMMV, and I certainly haven't worked with utilities from every mobo manufacturer or OEM, but this is not such a hard and fast rule anymore.

One extra word of advice -- at the very least, the Windows utilities generally allow you to make a backup of your current BIOS to the same type of file that your new BIOS download will be in. Make this copy and include it on your boot disk in case you have to rollback.

Posted by: dkawalec   Posted on: 07/02/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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