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AWARD Flash BIOS command line

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Originally posted by: JustaGeek
BTW, check your Power Supply - the shutdowns might be an indication of failing PSU.

I actually replaced my PSU with the one in my signature. Not an entire waste of money, as this one actually allows me to see all of my drives.
 
I use Gigabyte's @BIOS utility to update my BIOS in Windows and haven't had any problems. I don't update directly from the internet though. I download, save, extract and then update. I always keep all versions of BIOS on my secondary PC just in case. I don't have a floppy drive in my main rig (it can flash from USB, CDROM or HDD) but the first boot device is set to CDROM just in case of emergencies...
 
I strongly advise against using @BIOS or any other Windows-based BIOS updating program. It operates via Windows and downloads directly from the internet. If your connection is bad, Windows crashes or the connection drops you could totally kill the board and it will be dead.

You need to be unlucky for Windows to crash or the program to stop responding while flashing the BIOS. But updating via Windows is a risky variable that can be avoided altogether. Nobody wants to be cursing their bad luck when the avoidable and unlikely could have been avoided.

Updating the BIOS is probably the only update most people do that may result in a catastrophic failure of their rig. It should be done in the safest way possible. I really don't understand why Gigabyte, Asus and other manufacturers make these programs that carry this risk (however small). It is, in my opinion, bordering on the negligent.

I have never had a BSOD or Windows crash since Windows98 (to my recollection) that has not been caused by me stress-testing hardware or experimenting with heavy overclocks. But I would never update BIOS via Windows as I want to keep the risk to an absolute minimum.
 
Originally posted by: cozumel
I strongly advise against using @BIOS or any other Windows-based BIOS updating program. It operates via Windows and downloads directly from the internet.

Cozumel, I hear what you are saying, but @BIOS does not have to update from the internet. You can download the BIOS directly from the vendor's website (as I do), save it to HDD and then use @BIOS to flash it in Windows from the HDD. OK, so you think that is an unnecessary risk. Perhaps. But how big a risk? If you haven't had any crashes outside testing since Win98, and I haven't had any since when WP5.1 (!) was the big thing, is the risk there at all? Is there not a bigger likelihood that you'd suffer a power cut during flashing?

I can see what you mean about the effects of the risk, but is the likelihood of the risk so great as to make Windows flashing untenable? In my opinion, the answer is, for the great number of people, no. I stand to be corrected, however: I don't profess to have any empirical data on the subject. Just a lot of very happy experiences.


Bed time for me (1:22 GMT)

T42
 
The NVIDIA chipset drivers from asus.com are the same ones that are on my CD, even the date is the same.

I have vista as clean as possible running at the moment. No updates or drivers have been installed. Yet I can access the internet.
 
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