Wherefore art thou, BIOS flash (which works easily)

PCs have been around a while now. They're in our lives commonly, and the BIOS has been there since the very first IBM PC, giving the computer a way to start up.

In all this time we've seen a lot of improvements in the BIOS. Support for dynamically allocated resources (aka Plug n' Play), support for larger hard drives, and various new devices on the motherboard.

But in all these years we have yet to see a system that allows us to upgrade or replace our BIOS with ease. Yes, there are niche hardware offerings that have this - a socketed BIOS or a second copy of the BIOS on the mobo. And more recently one can load their BIOS from a USB thumb drive! Well, that's almost perfect. The ability to start up the PC, reload the BIOS, and move on.

If only it worked worth a goddamn!

Today, I need to update the BIOS on my wife's PC. She's got a Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2. Suppossedly a "Gamer's Choice" series of mobos. Since this particular board has a lack of features to handle a slightly wonky hard drive, I thought I would update the BIOS to see if the probelm its having with the primary hard drive might have been resolved in the BIOS's latest release. (The technical info on their web site doesn't indicate anything about this, but like most people, I'm used to companies either poorly or not at all documenting their products).

I find that the BIOS for this mobo does include a utility that should allow me to update the BIOS directly from the boot up screen and a USB thumb drive. Excellent, I think! Finally, the motherboard manufacturers are doing something about this obvious need... and only about 5 years after they should have. Ah well, at least its available today, when I need it.

So, with thumb drive in hand, loaded with the latest BIOS downloaded from Gigabyte's web site, I boot my wife's PC and enter the Q-Flash utility to do this thing. But... there's a glitch. The Q-falsh doesn't recognice the one flash drive I happen to have at home. Maybe it would recognize one of the ones from my office. But I'm home today, and my wife is threatening certain parts of anatomy if she has to wait another day for her machine!

But what's to be done? Gigabyte doesn't supply a Vista x64 based BIOS update utility that I can use, and since it can't read the 1GB thumb drive, I seem to be thoroughly SOL.

Looking on Gigabyte's web site, I see that they (terribly helpfully) support the floppy drive as well. Yawn,... yup, that's an option. Every machine I know of surely does have a floppy drive, yessiree. WTF?? What dumb ass makes a Q-Flash utility that can't read a very very common and compatible Cruiser 1GB thumb drive? Why the goddamn hell isn't there a reasonable way to upgrade this machine's BIOS? "Boot to DOS" says Gigabyte's online help. What DOS??? Using what device that your BIOS can boot to that some instance of DOS could even boot from???

I swear, computers are 100x more difficult to use than they ought to be and I cannot for the life of me imagine why the f@#! that is. I am a programmer, and I write software most every day of my life. If our company wrote products that were half as useless and poorly made as it seems Microsoft and the Mother board manufactures regularly excrete we'd be out of business in a heart beat. What the blasted hell do their programmers do all day? For the past 19 years??

We need PCs to have a bootable maintenance mode. A robust, easy to use core-level OS that allows us to do basic maintenance on our machines, not dependent upon 1980s era technology or an bootleg copy of DOS that nobody has anymore, and can't boot from any of the devices available on a modern machine anyway.

What do you think should be done to make maintaining PC hardware less burdensome? What about other hardware than the mobo? How should one upgrade their RAID adapter's BIOS?