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Foxconn motherboard bios updated today ! ;) (MB: NF4SK8AA-8KRS) (BIOS: 538W1P32.BIN)
Hello,
Today I got sick&tired of only having 3 GB of ram... while 4 GB of ram is available in the system. So today I decided to update/flash the bios for motherboard: WinFast motherboard NF4SK8AA-8KRS I used the following bios version: 538W1P32.BIN All went well... however windows is trying to find a driver for: Other PCI Bridge Device. Not sure why it is doing that. I know that windows detected one device on the motherboard wrongly in the passed, maybe it's trying to redetect it wrongly or rightly or something don't know yet what that is about. (It seems to be re-detecting all devices, this may take a while... once it's all done... I will re-test the memory performance to see if it makes a difference. I justed memory with AIDA64 benchmark yesterday... it's read/write speed was 4 GB/sec or so...so will be interesting to see if this would now change.) The process/it went as follows: 1. First a jumper has to be changed on the motherboard, the jumper is called: TBL_EN The blue jumper thingy has to be placed on pin 1 and 2. (Default is pin 2 and 3). A little triangle on the motherboard indicates which pin is 1. 2. Files have to be extracted, the password for the bios extraction from zipfile is: Los Angeles 3. www.bootdisk.com was used to download msdos6.22 boot disk creator, this is necessary for the flash program to work. 4. the flash.bat was edited with edit from msdos.622 because AFU879H.EXE had to be renamed to AFU879.EXE. 5. Some files from the bootdisk were deleted to make room for the bios, such as fdisk.exe emm386 and scandisk. 6. The system was booted into ms-dos 6.22 (I think it's most safe to make sure all files are on 1 disk... spreading it over multiple disks is risky.) (BANANA cd-rom name given... took a few seconds but it continued) 7. FLASH.BAT was run. 8. It started loading the bios file 9. It wented to save current bios... I didn't want that... so I presses enter on the filename edit boxing... hoping that that would skip it... not sure what that did. 10. I inspect the fllopy disk now... nothing was saved to it. 11. Fortunately the flash went ok... it showed some white boxes... and a few beeps here and there. 12. Then reboot and remove disk. 13. I used escape to get to boot menu to indicate which drive I want to boot from. 14, I detached my harddisks cables... that kinda was a mistake... but I was hoping to leave them out of it... but I needed to access them. 15. This caused system boot to fail cause I probably reconnected cables wrongly ?!?... but can be corrected with boot menu... 16. I tested to see if my harddisks still worked... with knoppix boot cd... I could not find linux mint 11 cd... I will have to create some new ones.. 32bit and 64 bit versions. 17. Getting the floppy drive to work was a bitch. 18. I used an older floppy drive... it's origin is unknown. 19. It seemed the floppy drive might be bad... so I finally disassembled what was left of one of my older computers which I knew had a good floppy drive so instead I attached that one. 20. A few floppy disks appeared to be bad according to window 7 x64 edition... tried to make startup disk.. but eventually decided to format it and use bootdisk creator from www.bootdisk.exe to do it properly. 21. Updating my system from a floppy disk seems really risky... but I did have a backup motherboard and bios chip if anything went bad. Also according to motherboard manual this bios/motherboard should be able to recover from bios flash failure. 22. I copied all files from floppy disk back to harddisk just to make sure all files were written correctly and could be read... before using the floppy drive I also blew some dust out of it... just to be sure. I left the floppy drive hanging in it's bracket so that the thing under it can spin if so required. 23. I simply left the case door open... and attached an IDE cable and a POWER cable to the floppy drive, it's an old white one. (Right now it seems to be re-installing my x-fi soundcard driver... I hope that goes well... whily I type this ) 24. My current DreamPC does not have a build in floppy drive so that really sucks... 25. I decided against using the other black usb-based floppy drive... cause it uses a 4-pin plug instead of 5-pin... so that ****er fried one of my motherboards once... and it was a bitch to get working correctly... so I decided not to risk blowing up my motherboard and not fiddle with it... too risky... too time consuming... so the old equipment/gear was actually much better/safer ! 26. The updating of my drivers for devices seems to be done, now I have to wait for svchost.exe to stop running at 50% cpu and then I can test memory. 27. I don't believe running at 4 GB will make much of a difference for gaming or webbrowsing... I think the real problem might be: firefox slow... and my CPU simply slow... and memory slow too. I noticed a benchmark screenshot on the internet of new skylake processor... it's cache is about 10x faster or memory 5x faster or so.... so I will definetly be buying/building a new system soon ! Cause this slow-ass ****... is starting to get annoying... though perhaps it's a windows 7 update conspiracy ?! Maybe windows 7 updates... made my system slower ?! It's an interesting and possible hypothesis ! 28. I am going to put this floppy disk away securely in my special box... cause this is one cool floppy disk ! 29. hopefully the extra 1 GB of ram that is now available will stop windows 7 from paging to disk so much... I think it's paging unnecessarily much and it's annoying... so hopefully windows 7 will do that now less. 30. Page file was always set to 8 GB and custom size... I just noticed something... my other drive does not seem to have a page file ?! Very interesting ?! Hmmm... the cause of this could be that I ran from one disk in the past. And I always notice how my second disk is going offline/sleeping. I think I may have to change this to set the page file to the second disk/data disk... for increased page file performance ?! This might explain my somewhat sluggish system response... or perhaps it's just the motherboard... not as fast as older ones.. Or perhaps it's all of the above. I will try and change page file to other disk... to see if that helps... it should ! =D As far as I can remember... windows creates page file per disk... but maybe not... hmmm.. Great this should help a lot... Maybe it's even possible to have multiple page files... I will try that too. Kinda strange how the page file from other disk went missing hmmm... I used to run with two page files... I think that might give increased page file swapping performance. So I will try with running two page files instead ! Fingers crossed ! It does require a reboot though ! =D I can't believe i've been running without a secondary page file lol... kinda strange... maybe I needed space back then... or didn't think much of it... thinking 3 GB would be enough... well not so ! Ok hopefully this new page file setup will increase system performance that would make me happy ! =D 31. I also booted my older pentium 3, 450 MHZ... it responded really weird... the first few times I tried to power it up... it beeped like crazy... and it was just weird... the only way I could solve it was to disconnect all power cables... and re-plug them in... that immediatly fixed it. So something weird is definetly going on with power cables... probably some kind of "electrical hole in it" that needs to be filled up... or perhaps it's picking up GSM signals/power and it starts to circling through the cables which might be creating a small little loop of some kind. Or perhaps it's because they have no EARTH... I think the GSM signal theory is a pretty good one... cause how the hell can it have electricty from itself ? The pentium 3 was rarely on... so I don't believe it's from itself... it's either: 1. electrical hole... or 2. gsm interference/power pickup=really weird stuff.! I was also surprised that it had 2 GB of ram that old pentium 3 of mine... that put a smile on my face ! =D I upgraded it a while ago... but I forgot how much RAM it had... It was not of much use cause I had to boot into my newer computer anyway... but nice to know the old computer still works too... I almost lost faith in it... thx to all that weir electrical behaviour... I was not recommend flying planes from now on... these GSM/UMTS signals are probably intererfering with electronics and cables in a much bigger way than people think... that's what I am starting to believe ! =D and I can know cause I live in a very busy area ! 32. Internet connection was also behaving somewhat weirdly... I did make sure to set time/date properly that's important for DNS/DHCP to work correctly... same behaviour on newer PC... however... pulling out plug from cable modem and re-powering it up... helped. and also re-enabling other connection I think that was the problem in windows... wrong adapter enabled but that's ok... it's always a bit of a fiddle. 33. I am not sure what I should do with the jumper on the motherboard... the readme first file (that came with the bios zip) did not say what to do with it afterwards... so for now I will leave it as it is... otherwise it might revert back to old bios or so... as perhaps a protection feature. As I type this mail svchost.exe is still running so can't really do memory benchmark yet... I want to do it when system is idle... so I will post a follow up as soon as I can do that ! I guess I have to reboot anyway... to enjoy my new pagefile found wealth ! LOL. 34. The link in the readme first file is bad/gone... so no instructions from foxconn how to create bootdisk... fortunately I know from that from dos-times... I don't think a windows startup disk will cut it... it's not the same thing... and using windows-related software for flashing is probably dangerous/not a good idea... stick with what was tested/used when the flash executable was created: ms-dos... I tried to follow the instructions as clearly as possible and fortunately it seemd to have worked out. 35. I wasn't quite sure which bios file was the most recent on the foxconn website... I already downloaded the 32 version 2 years ago or so ?! wow... so I've been running at least 2 years with just 3 GB of ram ! damn ! =D I cause I was not capable of updating back then because of pain in my back/back injury.. but now my back is good again... so I could pickup my system just fine. 36. I had to re-boot many times... cause I was confused about why my system didn't boot at first... wondered if that jumper had something to do with it... but that was not the case... I also wondered if the floppy drive might have something to do with boot failure... but also was not the case. 37. I hope my harddisks have not been damaged from all that picking up of my system... that would kinda suck and would maybe not have been worth it... perhaps I should have done data backup first to be on the safe side... but I kinda had a feeling this foxconn motherboard is strangely enough thrust worthy... and so it was. 38. I have further advice to anybody that reads this: don't buy asus motherboards for skylake processors... why you should not buy asus... I won't tell you. I keep it secret for now... until I bought my new system... I don't want components to sell-out... once I have my new system I will tell you why not to buy asus-motherboards ! I'll give you a hint though: asus has a critical system-life-saving option missing from their bios ! fools/assholes/turds ! No I definetly won't be buying motherboards from them. 39. I disabled the connection on my old pentium 3 as fast as possible once I found what I needed... just to prevent infection. Perhaps I should update it today... just to keep that old nice system updated... But first things first... first my main system has to be tested and rebooted some more... 40. I am not yet sure if new installed bios version 32 is stable or has any problems... but I would assume it's almost same bios... but with some 4 GB fixes... perhaps it will also solve the 10 minute freeze issue... yeah that could be nice to test ! First time I booted with new bios... no freeze... but that could be a fluke of luck ! 41. I also had to find the card box material to put my PC on it was in a box in spear room somewhere... but fortunately I found it... not having that would have driven me insane... cause then I could scratch my desk. 42. I also slightly bummed my PC into my monitor but fortunately no scratch or damage spotted so far... 43. Fortunately I have a big wooden table... so I can put keyboard and mouse aside... it's still a bit crowded... but doing this on a smaller table would have sucked bad/nearly impossible !? So you see... what seems like a simple task was actually quite complex/long and filled with bear-puts and troubles and lots of time consuming things... But I managed to circumvent all ! =D 44. If my system had died... I would have had a lot more work to do... replace motherboard and then I would still be stuck with 3 GB... and I am kinda running low on artic silver 7... so not sure I could have reattached cpu heatsink properly... I am not sure what I would have done ?! maybe ditch the whole damn system, except for my beloved harddisks and soundblaster lol.. or maybe I would haev just installed the backup motherboard.. probably last option... but I would have hated it ! 45. Also it was quite amazing to hear my old pentium 3 on... I guess it's using a new power supply... it's quite quiet... what a difference compared to my Dream PC which is quite loudly... even a girly that came by some time ago noticed it ! hmmm I do have fans a bit higher than usually cause of summer... I ll put those a bit lower now that the heat is a bit over... before I forget to do that ! Better to avoid dust build up too... I will leave dust on cpu heatsink for now... 46. Ok I just realized I am not done yet.... still have to figure out how to properly connect cables so system boots in proper order... I already tried changing order in bios... or specifieing what to boot from but that strangely enough didn't work... that was quite strange. 47. I kinda like the funny "can't boot problem"... it might prevent noobs from booting my system... but I I die... I want people to be able to at least boot my system... not thinking that it's bad or anything... but anyway... bad boot settings could be considered a security feature lol. But smarter people with more time... might figure it out how to do it... law enforcement might re-attach harddisk to other systems though... but that's outside the scope of this story... nothing to see here... moving along ! Well I like foxconn for now... they have proven themselfes worthy of SKYBUCK-APPROVAL and that's something that doesn't come by easy ! They will probably not be my new motherboard supplier for skylake processor ?!? or perhaps they might be... to be honest... I haven't looked yet if they have a motherboard available for skylake processor from intel... All the review sites didn't mention a motherboard from foxconn... but perhaps they boycott it or are just clueless so I will have to investigate foxconn later on. svchost.exe still running even after all this typing... wow... well time for a reboot ! and time to place this holy disk into a safe storage place... in case I ever need to flash that other backup motherboard ! The disk doesn't have a sticker though... I probably don't have those anymore... or maybe they somewhere in the spare-gear-reoom... but I think I ran out of those... not sure... but for now it;'s ok... I'll remember it's in the spare-box-room ! Ok well quite a large adventure for me today/this night... I was also slighty frustrated after a game of company of heroes... maybe that triggered this ! LOL... but as psychs say... a bit of frustration motivates people/probably yourself... and yes it did... Cause when I exitted company of heroes it took way too long before I could type a posting about a bug in that game I guess ! But during this posting I realized... the page file settings might play a roll in that... oh yeah... another good reason to reboot... so I am gonna try that... right now ! Reasons to reboot for me: 1. page file settings 2. test if freeze is still there... So bye for now =D May the bios-flash-gods be with you ! =D today they were with me ! =D Hopefully I don't regret it ! =D Bye, Skybuck =DDDDD P.S.: 4 GB is coming my way/all mine soon ! =D |
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