A friendly reminder to all fellow Laptop owners

Today I was playing some Skyrim when suddenly out of the blue my Laptop turned off. When I turned it back on the Fans were blowing at full throttle, the Battery wasn't recognized and MOST of the keys on my Keyboard weren't working. Even plugging in a USB keyboard didn't solve the problem.
Very scary situation.

Immediately imagined that it was a Bios error and booted off my USB flash drive which had a copy of my Laptop's bios still on it. When in the Bios menu couldn't select the Flash Drive due to the arrow keys and number keys not working.

Rebooted and Windows started. Luckily my touchpad was still functional and I still had a Bios flash saved in one of my backup folders. Managed to reflash the Bios through Windows and rebooted. Everything is now back in order. (some application on startup were disabled, other than that I haven't found anything else out of order).

I would have been royally screwed if I didn't have a copy saved on my hard drive and was lucky that my Bios was still functional enough to allow me to flash through Windows.

To anyone reading this, always keep a copy of your Laptop's Bios saved on as many locations as possible because you never know when something random and dangerous like this might happen to you.

 

thanks man for the info. dont know much about the bios however i need to backup all my stuff pronto

 

How can playing skyrim, or any game for that matter corrupt your BIOS? were you OC'd to a point where it was not stable or were you at stock speeds?

granted the tip you mentioned is useful, its still strange that that would happen to you without more info as to why it happened in the first place.

 

I'm not saying playing the game caused a BIOS error, just that it happened while I was playing the game. Could have been caused by a number of things, although probably an OC instability issue caused by the CPU. Or it might have been a display driver error, have no way of telling how it happened at this point, only that it is the first time my actual BIOS was affected by a crash.

 

how do you get a copy of your bios?

 

I found mine on the Gateway official Support site. Also I found one with the EIST option disabled here on this forum, on the Gateway & e-machines section. I'm sure Asus and Toshiba post the Bios for your laptops as well.

 

thanks for the tip

 

No problem man, I'm here to help out!

 

Thanks for the tip man!

By the way, I noticed you managed to play Zelda Skyward Sword on your lappy!

Did you use a Wii controller? which model?
Thanks

 

Good advice. +rep

 

Np!

I'm actually emulating the Wii controller with my PC Xbox 360 Wireless controller.

Takes a bit of tinkering to get it configured so that gameplay controls feel intuitive, but works great.