This article is more than 1 year old

Intel shoots self in foot. Twice

Reg praises Intel, wheels immediately fall off

We're obviously going to have to stop writing nice things about Intel, because no sooner do we praise Chipzilla for doing something well, than it all goes horribly pear-shaped.

We praised the Great Stan of Chipsets for producing a nice mobo in the shape of the Sheena Easton Intel makes nice mobo shock! and then we found that they've somehow omitted to ship the best available audio drivers for it.

A few weeks back we said how pleasant the new Express BIOS update utility was, and blow me, it vanishes off the face of the Earth, or at least for the VC820 Vancouver, it does.

Back at the beginning of July, we tried Intel's new Express BIOS Update that is designed to allow users to update the BIOS on an Intel VC820, D815EEA or MO810E mobo from within Windows. We tried it on a Vancouver VC820 and it worked perfectly, and very quickly.

Trouble was, there was an erratumnotbug in that version of the BIOS that caused the onboard audio to shuffle off this mortal coil if the system ever went into ACPI sleep. The BIOS was removed from the site, sharpish.

Now there's a new rev of the Vancouver BIOS (version 15) which works fine - well, at least we haven't found anything wrong yet in the 36 hours we've been running it.

What there isn't is the Express BIOS update itself - it's back to those boring old boot floppies (you know, the ones you can't create if you're running Windows ME or Win 2K). A cryptic message on the Intel support site says: "NOTICE. A future BIOS release will include the Express BIOS Update Utility."

We were a tad confused now, as the clear implication here is that the update mechanism, rather than the BIOS itself, was being blamed for causing the Vancouver audio glitch, especially as Express Update is still available for the latest rev of the D815EEA Easton mobo. We could think of no way that this could be the case.

So we asked Intel. The somewhat unconvincing reply was that they had to evaluate the Express Update with every iteration of every BIOS for every mobo.

What on Earth is going on? ®

Related Stories

New Intel BIOS update utility - it works!
Intel gets round Windows boot floppy problem
Intel not shipping the best audio drivers for its Easton mobo
Intel makes nice mobo shock!

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