My desktop machine has a Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra 939 motherboard. It’s been great; rock-solid and performs exactly as expected.
One of the nicest things is that it has the ability to update the BIOS from within the BIOS. You bring up the BIOS, tell it to find a new firmware revision on a floppy, and it updates itself. No OS needed. Fantastic. No longer is a user required to have a specific OS in order to update their BIOS.
Except Gigabyte distributes the firmware as a self-extracting Windows executable. That’s right. The firmware comes as a .exe file that will only expand under Windows (and yes, I have tried to unzip it with Linux’s unzip with no luck).
How farking brain-dead is this? There’s no need to compress the BIOS image, it’s small enough for even modem users. But then to compress it and lock users into a specific OS in order to decompress it is just idiocy. Any benefit provided by the BIOS being OS-agnostic and being able to update itself is rendered completely useless by some idiot engineering manager’s decision to distribute a self-extracting Windows executable. And not even provide a .zip file for people that might not run Windows.
Gigabyte, are you listening? Do you care about your customers that choose not to run Windows? Do you yourselves really understand the benefits of a self-updating BIOS?
Morons.