My computer's mother board needed a bios update to 'see' the processor I now have in it.
1. Is the mother board bios update installed on the mother board or on some part of the hard drive, like many other drivers/updates?
2. If I format and reinstall vista will this undo the update to the mother board bios?
Mother board Gigabyte MA790X-DS4
Processor AMD Phenom9950 Quad-Core Processor 2.61 GHz
Ram 4.00 GB
Windows Vista 64-bit Operating System
I had a guy form a computer shop/repair build me a Computer a little over a year ago. Since then I have moved. When he got it all together it would not see the Phenom quad core processor, so he had to take the computer apart and install another processor to update the Bios for the Gigabyte MA790X-DS4. When that was done he put back in the quad core and it all worked fine. Nice and Stable, other than a power outage problem on my side.
Since then though my own use, I have installed/uninstalled many things surfed the web for info on many of the games I play. Slowly I have picked up errors here and there, weather form bugs, viral, or other problems I am unsure. I keep an external hard drive on witch I back up my personal files too.
I have used many viral, anti malware type programs to well do what they do lol. I never use more than one, uninstalling them once my computer starts acting up and moving on to a new one.
By acting up I mean; Over all slowing down using basic programs, start up time going form a little under a min to taking over 10 mins to just get to the windows logo screen, wont run x program after having ran it fine for many months, freezes up with no blue screen, locks up with blue screen, unexplainable activity on the internet (downloading/uploading without me doing anything on the net) hitting between 13kbs to 30kbs... and many other things that I just don't feel like typing out. The latest of witch is my McAfee AntiVirus Plus updating and needing to restart. After restarting and making it into windows, were it starts opening the start up programs, my quad core will max out one of its cores, and the hole computer stops and will not do anything. It does not go to the Blue Screen.
I can go into safe mode and using msconfig disable McAfee form starting up and it all runs fine when I restart. When I start open McAfee after windows has been up a while it works, till I shut down/restart again.
Any ways, I am thinking about just format ing the hard drive and reinstalling a fresh copy of vista form my cd drive and starting all over again, but I do not understand the bios thing. Will a format mess up the bios update that was need for my mother board to see my phenom quad core? I don't have the tools or now how to switch out the processor like the guy who built it did to re-update my bios, nor the 2nd processor to do it with...
So can I format and reinstall vista without it affecting my bios update?
Thanks in advance for any and all help I get.