In the past there have been compelling reasons to upgrade your BIOS, such as for Y2K compliance or to support high capacity hard drives that older BIOS chips simply wouldn’t recognise.
These days the rate of technological development is such that motherboard manufacturers release new BIOS versions far more frequently than in the past, generally to include new features such as support for:
- additional CPUs
- new, or faster memory
- new, or faster peripheral interfaces
- additional plug&play devices
- new operating systems.
Increasingly, another reason is to fix problems in earlier releases!
Notwithstanding the fact that manufacturers have made great strides in making the process easier in recent years, the fact is that there remain sufficient risks associated with the process for the rule to continue to be that you should only update your BIOS if you have a compelling reason so to do.
Something you need to do before you update your BIOS, whichever method you use, is to make a record of your current BIOS settings. Unfortunately – in the context of the traditional method for updating a BIOS at least – this has to be done the hard way, by going through each of the BIOS screens in turn and making a note of the various settings. It’s tedious, but it’s the only way of ensuring that you have a record of changes you’ve made to the current BIOS’s default settings – so that you can make the same changes in the new BIOS version