I have just learned a costly lesson - never update a computer BIOS from within Windows where possible! The other day while still waiting for my replacement LCD to arrive I thought I’d install the latest CVS build of XBOX Media Centre on the good ol’ XBOX, and without realizing I accidentally pressed something causing the XBOX to crash half way through uploading the files.. damn it! Annoyed that I now had to rebuild the hard drive I thought I might as well ruin the computer as well (sarcasm), so I downloaded the Asus update application from their website along with the latest BIOS thinking after the update I’d try to push the CPU a bit further.

I ran the update program and it appeared fine until half way through when a message came up saying something about an invalid checksum before crashing, so I tried to open the application again and it crashed exclaiming that it didn’t find an Asus BIOS. I didn’t think anything of it until I restarted the computer and seeing it no longer started. The stupid update program destroyed the BIOS, forcing me to go and get a replacement motherboard (I replaced with the P5K-E WiFi with a P5KC.. never used the hopeless WiFi AP and DDR3 support is of coarse a bit of future-proofing).

Learn from my mistake: If updating the BIOS and your motherboard supports it, update with the built-in utilities.