Bios Flash

**MobilePCPhysician** · October 16th, 2005, 12:43 AM

I own a pc repair business. We repair roughly 3-15 pc's a day. Some of this work is Linux, Sun, etc. but for the most part small business, home-office user.
My question to other repair people is, how often have you had to flash the bios of someone's computer to allow them keep using it? Did the board have to be flashed to allow a larger drive to be installed, etc????

I can honestly say, since I've been in business, 8-9 years, I've flashed 2 or three boards.

**confus-ed** · October 16th, 2005, 01:21 AM

I want another option !

I flash bioses, as & when required.

I reckon I do it once or twice a week, as lots of my work is upgrading /fitting extra bits, it depends what you are rolling out in terms of new machines, lots of my customers want the 'latest & greatest', & so the boards they have usually have 'immature bioses', which require updates.

**TechZ** · October 16th, 2005, 04:54 AM

I only flash the BIOS if and only if there is an issue that a BIOS upgrade can solve.

**confus-ed** · October 16th, 2005, 04:01 PM

Originally Posted by TechZ

I only flash the BIOS if and only if there is an issue that a BIOS upgrade can solve.

& how are you meant to know that then ? Release notes on many bioses are as much good as chocolate teapots

I'll agree there are kinds of issues a bios update will usually solve, like IRQ allocation issues, but many things a bios flash might solve are hardly obvious, so sometimes you just have to take a view & do a bit of 'download & hope'

**Garak** · October 16th, 2005, 05:49 PM

Well, until my work dried up, I reflashed BIOS's on a regular basis,mainly due to clients "trying it for themselves" and royally mucking itup, like flashing the BIOS with the power of the UPS only, or restarting because the machine locked and so on. As for flashing them in general - only when needed for example the 32gig harddrive issue - I used to get this alot as most of my clients didn't want to upgrade the whole machine because theywanted the extra space.

**Potato Salad** · October 16th, 2005, 05:52 PM

Ive been working at a computer tech place for 1 year now and to date if had to flash 1 bios.

**Ruslan** · October 16th, 2005, 08:42 PM

After reading my "BIOS recovery tips" you can guess I do very often...

In fact, I do it in 100% of cases if I'm building PC for someone - BIOS must be always up to date, IMHO... Any MB I use or keep as spare have latest BIOS update...
As for customer's PCs, I usually ask them before to let them know benefits they can get from new BIOS update (faster CPU support, larger HDDs or some bugs fixes). But if customer doesn't care, why bother?