UPDATE THE BIOS

Now it’s time to update your BIOS, and get everything ticking along smoothly. Depending on how long your motherboard has been sitting in a warehouse, you might not have the latest BIOS installed. BIOS updates typically improve stability, weed out bugs, such as Spectre and Meltdown, and can, in some cases, improve performance. Head back to your motherboard’s web page, and into “Support.” Download the most recent BIOS update, and place it on your desktop. For a BIOS to read an update off storage, the BIOS update file needs to be placed on a memory stick or storage device that has been formatted to the FAT32 file system. Fortunately, your Windows 10 install stick we used earlier already has been.

Plug your Windows install stick into your system, create a new folder inside it called something like “BIOS Updates,” take the BIOS update you downloaded, and extract it into this folder. Restart your machine and mash the Delete key to get back into the BIOS. This next step varies, depending on the motherboard (check your manual). In our case, move the mouse to the bottom-right, and a pop-up menu appears. Select “Q Flash,” then “Update BIOS,” after which you need to find the BIOS folder you made earlier on your memory stick. Select the BIOS file in that folder, and hit the arrow to the right. Your system now starts updating the BIOS. It’s imperative at this point that you do not reset or switch off your machine, or you could brick the entire board. Let it do what it has to; it may restart a few times. Once done, head back into the BIOS (we still have work to do).