Category: Uncategorized

Bun­dled with Gi­ga­byte moth­er­boards is a small util­i­ty called “@BIOS”, which pur­ports to have the abil­i­ty to up­date the moth­er­board BIOS from with­in Win­dows, XP or Vis­ta. A lot of “ad­vanced” com­put­er users tend to be wary of such a propo­si­tion, but Toshiba lap­top BIOS­es ac­tu­al­ly do have this func­tion­al­i­ty and it works quite well.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, Gi­ga­byte’s tool does not work as ex­pect­ed. I tried to up­date my BIOS from with­in Win­dows Vis­ta, with no other pro­grams run­ning, and the pro­gram crashed in the mid­dle of flash­ing the ROM. For­tu­nate­ly, I ex­pect­ed that my board would be dead, so I looked some stuff up on Google be­fore I re­boot­ed. Posts on some fo­rums told me that the BIOS would au­to-re­cov­er an im­age from the hard drive, so I down­load­ed Gi­ga­byte’s lat­est BIOS from their web­site and put it on the root of my drive. I was lucky; when I re­boot­ed, the BIOS found the im­age and was able to re­cov­er it­self.

Lesson learned? Avoid @BIOS like the plague.

To­day I had a prob­lem with AVG free an­ti-virus (my fa­vorite free an­ti-virus soft­ware, by the way). The up­dater com­po­nent told me that “a .bin file is missing”, a prob­lem which I could not solve my­self. So I searched on Google for it, and lo! the top en­try is a fo­rum post ex­plain­ing that it’s just a tem­po­rary prob­lem with AVG’s up­dates and should be fixed to­mor­row…

Wait a sec­ond, a tem­po­rary prob­lem that should be fixed to­mor­row? I checked the date on the post, and it was from to­day. I knew that Google had a lot of dis­tribut­ed com­put­ing re­sources… but be­ing able to find and in­dex posts, giv­ing them rea­son­able PageR­anks on the day that they ap­pear?

I have now de­vel­oped an en­tire­ly new re­spect for the pow­er of Google.

Wel­come to the new Non­graph­i­cal.com! Ob­vi­ous­ly, I’ve made a lot of changes here. It’s a whole new de­sign with a whole new back­end. I sup­pose I should say that it’s al­so a whole new blog. I’ll be writ­ing re­views, most­ly on what I con­sid­er use­ful tech. I’ll al­so be pub­lish­ing ar­ti­cles and tu­to­ri­als on topics I can’t find else­where.

And hey, if you like this, let me de­sign some­thing like it for you! I do styles, PHP and Python pro­gram­ming, and al­so work with third-par­ty apps (like Word­Press). I al­so try for 100% valid XHTML and CSS. Check out my port­fo­lio for more in­for­ma­tion.