Last night I finally got around to putting together a combination home theater PC/Dev machine. I'd ordered the parts weeks ago but I'd ran into power supply problems (the Forton Zen power supply that I'd that I'd ordered was either incompatible with my equipment or it was faulty, I've yet to determine which because Fortron tech support hasn't responded to my support request).
After plugging in the new PSU last night I started to install Windows just to exercise the hardware and make sure everything was okay. It wasn't, the memory was acting flaky, and I needed to flash the BIOS to fix it.
I generally dread this process because over the years it's gotten more difficult. Back in the DOS/Windows9x days, making a bootable floppy was easy enough. But it doesn't make sense to keep floppies around anymore just to flash a BIOS, and making a bootable CD is a hassle when you don't do it often. EZ-Flash got rid of the bootable disk problem by allowing you to access CDs from the BIOS, but you still had to burn a CD and burners are notoriously unreliable and what do you do if you don't have one?
I do have one, but for whatever reason it wasn't working, so on a lark I put the BIOS file on a USB key and plugged it into the motherboard and checked, sure enough, EZ-Flash now recognizes USB drives. Updating was a snap and the DDR2-800 DIMMs work great now. Flashing a BIOS is once again an easy process, no matter what OS you use. Yay!
So does anyone out there know when this was implemented? Via Google I see people who are still using the bootable USB drive trick in 2006 so I think it's a recent invention but since I don't upgrade machines often I'm not really sure. Do other motherboard manufacturers do this now? I definitely want this feature on all my future machines, so if you happen to know please let me know in the comments or e-mail.