Karl and Angela Rees

Last week, as I was trying to make our entertainment PC run more quietly, I accidentally erased its BIOS. I won't explain how, because it will make me sound stupid. But after a decade of reflashing motherboards and never once screwing things up, I finally found myself in the dreaded position that they always warn you about--having a perfectly good motherboard become entirely useless because its BIOS is screwed up.

It had never occurred to me that there was a way to recover from this sort of problem. In fact, had it happened to any computer besides my Shuttle XPC, I'd have just gone out and bought the cheapest replacement motherboard I could find. But with an XPC, I would have had to have bought an entirely new barebone PC, which costs way more money than Angela probably would have let me spend.

After searching on the Internet, I found that there are services out there that will ship you a new BIOS chip, which you can then replace yourself. I was relieved to discover that this process was not only inexpesnive, but required absolutely no soldering--the BIOS chips just pops right into a little socket on the motherboard.

There were several services available, but the one I went with was http://badflash.com/. I found a few good reviews of them online, plus they offered a lot of comforting reassurances on their website. They shipped very quickly (ordered on Sunday night, had it by Thursday morning), and they only charged $25. All in all, it was a very good deal, and my satsifaction level was so high I decided to right a review.

On a side note, I had also explored the option of getting an EPROM programmer for $50 off eBay and just reprogramming the chip myself. Then I could either keep the programmer in case this happened again (or in case I ever wanted to experiment with programming flash chips on other devices), or I could sell it back on eBay. I eventually decided against this because I couldn't find very good instructions, and decided that as a law student, I just couldn't afford to take the time to figure it out on my own.