In other moos...

Giant Search engine, advertising giant, and bovine privacy invader, Moogle (NASDAQ: MOOG), bought MooTube today, for several hundred Moollion dollars.

For moore on this, we go to our finance Bull, live from the pasture of the Moo York Stock Exchange...

In other moos...

Giant Search engine, advertising giant, and bovine privacy invader, Moogle (NASDAQ: MOOG), bought MooTube today, for several hundred Moollion dollars.

For moore on this, we go to our finance Bull, live from the pasture of the Moo York Stock Exchange...

In other moos...

Giant Search engine, advertising giant, and bovine privacy invader, Moogle (NASDAQ: MOOG), bought MooTube today, for several hundred Moollion dollars.

For moore on this, we go to our finance Bull, live from the pasture of the Moo York Stock Exchange...

How NOT to update your BIOS.

I was doing a bit of regular maintenance on ye ole computater at home last night, and one of the things I do regularly with newer motherboards is check for BIOS updates on a monthly schedule (and this motherboard is very recent in design and chipset (Abit IP35), so BIOS updates are still coming out about every 6 - 8 weeks). Lo and behold, the tool that checks for new versions found one, and asked me if I'd like to update to it? So I'm all "sure d00d, you do what you gotta do".

You know what the last thing you want to happen while in the middle of updating the firmware on the motherboard is? It wasn't a power failure, but it might as well have been. Machine locked. Hard. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...etc.

Fortunately, modern motherboards are far more tolerant of these kinds of things than they once were. This motherboard has an extremely rudimentary ROM BIOS that will let you do ONE thing. You can boot from a floppy. Good thing I spent the $13 the weekend before last and installed one (Windows XP won't recognize the SATA controller in AHCI mode during install unless you point it at a driver disk, and hey, despite Windows having installed from bootable CD-ROM since Windows 98, it STILL can't fucking load a driver from anything but a floppy drive (well, Vista actually finally can load a driver from an optical drive, but it can't be the one you're installing from, because removing that DVD makes it cry and go sit in a corner)). It doesn't recognize a USB keyboard here, so I have to go dig my old IBM keyboard out of the closet. Yay.

So, now I dig up a floppy, carry it to the machine upstairs, and format it with the "make a bootable DOS floppy" option.

Next we hit Abit's website, and pull down the DOS tool for doing what has always worked fine using the Winderz tool up until now.

Go to dump it on the floppy...and, it doesn't fit.

Seems that XP dumps a bunch of extraneous shit on a bootable floppy, and formatting it plain jane and running the sys command is a no go. Format it again, making it bootable, run back downstairs, grab yet another floppy, format it, and then dump the Abit stuff on to it.

Now we run back downstairs, boot from floppy number one, switch to floppy two, and then get told the batch file we wanted to run wasn't found. Thank you Microsoft for caching the FAT table in whatever version of DOS XP dumps on to a bootable floppy. Run dir, forcing a reread of the disk, and run said batch file again.

Yay, we have working BIOS again, although one that needs all its CMOS settings put back to where they belong.

I've found Abit to build very stable motherboards that perform to the full expectations of the chipset and bus types, but man, here's where they could take a lesson from Gigabyte. Gigabyte put two EEPROMs on the motherboard, and when you update, the first one is erased, updated and verified, and only when that is fully complete is the backup erased, updated and verified. You cannot put the motherboard in a state where it cannot boot because of a bad BIOS update.

How NOT to update your BIOS.

I was doing a bit of regular maintenance on ye ole computater at home last night, and one of the things I do regularly with newer motherboards is check for BIOS updates on a monthly schedule (and this motherboard is very recent in design and chipset (Abit IP35), so BIOS updates are still coming out about every 6 - 8 weeks). Lo and behold, the tool that checks for new versions found one, and asked me if I'd like to update to it? So I'm all "sure d00d, you do what you gotta do".

You know what the last thing you want to happen while in the middle of updating the firmware on the motherboard is? It wasn't a power failure, but it might as well have been. Machine locked. Hard. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...etc.

Fortunately, modern motherboards are far more tolerant of these kinds of things than they once were. This motherboard has an extremely rudimentary ROM BIOS that will let you do ONE thing. You can boot from a floppy. Good thing I spent the $13 the weekend before last and installed one (Windows XP won't recognize the SATA controller in AHCI mode during install unless you point it at a driver disk, and hey, despite Windows having installed from bootable CD-ROM since Windows 98, it STILL can't fucking load a driver from anything but a floppy drive (well, Vista actually finally can load a driver from an optical drive, but it can't be the one you're installing from, because removing that DVD makes it cry and go sit in a corner)). It doesn't recognize a USB keyboard here, so I have to go dig my old IBM keyboard out of the closet. Yay.

So, now I dig up a floppy, carry it to the machine upstairs, and format it with the "make a bootable DOS floppy" option.

Next we hit Abit's website, and pull down the DOS tool for doing what has always worked fine using the Winderz tool up until now.

Go to dump it on the floppy...and, it doesn't fit.

Seems that XP dumps a bunch of extraneous shit on a bootable floppy, and formatting it plain jane and running the sys command is a no go. Format it again, making it bootable, run back downstairs, grab yet another floppy, format it, and then dump the Abit stuff on to it.

Now we run back downstairs, boot from floppy number one, switch to floppy two, and then get told the batch file we wanted to run wasn't found. Thank you Microsoft for caching the FAT table in whatever version of DOS XP dumps on to a bootable floppy. Run dir, forcing a reread of the disk, and run said batch file again.

Yay, we have working BIOS again, although one that needs all its CMOS settings put back to where they belong.

I've found Abit to build very stable motherboards that perform to the full expectations of the chipset and bus types, but man, here's where they could take a lesson from Gigabyte. Gigabyte put two EEPROMs on the motherboard, and when you update, the first one is erased, updated and verified, and only when that is fully complete is the backup erased, updated and verified. You cannot put the motherboard in a state where it cannot boot because of a bad BIOS update.

How NOT to update your BIOS.

I was doing a bit of regular maintenance on ye ole computater at home last night, and one of the things I do regularly with newer motherboards is check for BIOS updates on a monthly schedule (and this motherboard is very recent in design and chipset (Abit IP35), so BIOS updates are still coming out about every 6 - 8 weeks). Lo and behold, the tool that checks for new versions found one, and asked me if I'd like to update to it? So I'm all "sure d00d, you do what you gotta do".

You know what the last thing you want to happen while in the middle of updating the firmware on the motherboard is? It wasn't a power failure, but it might as well have been. Machine locked. Hard. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...etc.

Fortunately, modern motherboards are far more tolerant of these kinds of things than they once were. This motherboard has an extremely rudimentary ROM BIOS that will let you do ONE thing. You can boot from a floppy. Good thing I spent the $13 the weekend before last and installed one (Windows XP won't recognize the SATA controller in AHCI mode during install unless you point it at a driver disk, and hey, despite Windows having installed from bootable CD-ROM since Windows 98, it STILL can't fucking load a driver from anything but a floppy drive (well, Vista actually finally can load a driver from an optical drive, but it can't be the one you're installing from, because removing that DVD makes it cry and go sit in a corner)). It doesn't recognize a USB keyboard here, so I have to go dig my old IBM keyboard out of the closet. Yay.

So, now I dig up a floppy, carry it to the machine upstairs, and format it with the "make a bootable DOS floppy" option.

Next we hit Abit's website, and pull down the DOS tool for doing what has always worked fine using the Winderz tool up until now.

Go to dump it on the floppy...and, it doesn't fit.

Seems that XP dumps a bunch of extraneous shit on a bootable floppy, and formatting it plain jane and running the sys command is a no go. Format it again, making it bootable, run back downstairs, grab yet another floppy, format it, and then dump the Abit stuff on to it.

Now we run back downstairs, boot from floppy number one, switch to floppy two, and then get told the batch file we wanted to run wasn't found. Thank you Microsoft for caching the FAT table in whatever version of DOS XP dumps on to a bootable floppy. Run dir, forcing a reread of the disk, and run said batch file again.

Yay, we have working BIOS again, although one that needs all its CMOS settings put back to where they belong.

I've found Abit to build very stable motherboards that perform to the full expectations of the chipset and bus types, but man, here's where they could take a lesson from Gigabyte. Gigabyte put two EEPROMs on the motherboard, and when you update, the first one is erased, updated and verified, and only when that is fully complete is the backup erased, updated and verified. You cannot put the motherboard in a state where it cannot boot because of a bad BIOS update.

These are for KIDS?!

Yes, that's a gun that fires teddy bears. Although crime is rare in Japan, when it happens, it is absolutely hilarious.

These are for KIDS?!

Yes, that's a gun that fires teddy bears. Although crime is rare in Japan, when it happens, it is absolutely hilarious.

These are for KIDS?!

Yes, that's a gun that fires teddy bears. Although crime is rare in Japan, when it happens, it is absolutely hilarious.