Vista 64 issues and help with flashing BIOS

[knopstr]

I was finally able to secure a copy of Vista Ultimate 64 from Fry's yesterday. I excitedly installed my 2 new hard drives, enabled Raid and proceeded to load up Vista.

It seems to be fairly unstable on my system. When I try to update various drivers I get a fair number of blue screens.

My MB is a XFX790 ultra sli. I have 8gbs of ddr3 Corsair Memory. When I check XFX's website I see that they recommend updating the BIOS to a new version. I'm unsure as to how to actually do this. They have both a bin file and an ISO image. Do I simply download and burn the ISO and then reboot and voila? or is there more than meets the eye with this method?

What else do I have to update in order for Vista to run smoothly at this point?

Thanks for your time and consideration.

[Tombs]

Some manufacturers are weird some give you a CD (or ISO for one) to load the utilities for flashing the bios then want you to have the bios file on a floppy. Some have methods to do this with a usb drive or straight from a floppy. Best instructions are probably on their site somewhere.

I don't remember the exact name of it but there is an event viewer / error reporter tool in vista that can give you some more info on blue screens.

I'd consider replacing any "old" hardware that they're not sure is 64-bit compatible.

[Catamer]

Sometimes they have a windows version of the flash. It didn't work on my PC for some reason ( I don't have your motherboard )

So I had to do the ISO image and burn a CD or DVD with it.
I used a program like BurnCDCC.exe ( a freeware program to write ISO images to disk )

The ISO image Intel gave me had a linux on it and the linux would not recognize my SATA DVD drive, I had to borrow someones USB CDROM drive to flash my bios.

for me and my DQ45CB motherboard, it was a huge fix to flash the bios with a new one.

good luck with that.

[knopstr]

I'm up and running again. XFX has EXCELLENT technical support...less than 3 min waiting times and Corsair was awesome too.

For anyone running XFX 790 Ultra sli MB with Corsair 1600DDR3 (TW3X4G1600C9DHX) memory, your memory BIOS settings will be 9-9-9-24-2T @ 1.8 volts. I have an Intel 9650xtreme processor which they recommended running at 10x. and upping my FSB to 1600mhz even though the specs have it at 1333. They say you can run my processor at 4ghz with just air cooling without an issue.