Flash my Bios with USB Drive??

GatorsUF · May 9, 2009

Ok here is the deal. My computer kinda runs slow because it is really old, so figured flashing my Bios would help?? It has been formatted a few times, it was sold with WinME I now have XP Pro on it. It has no floppy drive but the bios settings allows me to boot from "removable storage". I have downloaded the Bios from Gateway.com, but since I donot have floppy, I need to use USB pen drive. The instructions call for IBM formatted disk. Any help would be great.

JustinHoMi · May 9, 2009

Flashing your BIOS won't improve the speed any. In general, you don't want to flash your BIOS unless you have a problem with your PC that could be attributed to the BIOS (and speed is not one of those issues).

That said... if the instructions call for a floppy, that's probably the only way to do it. A failed flash upgrade can toast your PC, and you should always follow the instructions exactly.

plodr · May 9, 2009

Add RAM. (with XP, 1GB will speed it up, provided your computer supports installing 1GB) Post your startup list. Removing unnecessary programs from that will speed it up too. I brought an XP computer home with 256MB of RAM and tons of unnecessary things running at startup. I'd say it took between 5 and 10 minutes to finally be usable after it was turned on. I added 1GB of RAM, cleaned out the junk, uninstalled some programs and stopped others from loading at startup. It loads in about a minute and is peppy.
Given the age of your computer, it probably can not boot from a USB drive so trying to put a BIOS flash on a USB drive and expecting the computer to boot from it will probably be impossible.

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Flash my Bios with USB Drive??

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