I've been doing a lot of video editing lately, capturing digital video over firewire from my digital camcorder.  Unfortunately, I'd noticed that every so often, I would drop a bunch of frames.  Like, hundreds, all in one pop.  Dropping one or two frames here and there is normal.  Dropping hundreds is not.

I also noticed that occasionally on playback, the video would freeze and the audio would stutter.  This seems strange, because my current rig is no slouch:  Dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, with 3 GB of RAM running Vista Ultimate (alas, 32-bit.  I'm not brave enough to move to 64-bit yet).   I noticed that the stutter/freeze had a tendency to occur  whenever there was hard drive activity.  Just try to get Vista to stop all hard drive activity.  Especially when you're capture full-frame uncompressed video.  (Side note:  I originally tried to blame Vista, so I tried to fix it by installing Service Pack 1 RC1.  While SP1 gets my seal of approval as being chock full of win, it didn't fix my issue...)

A little Googling led me to the general understanding that this is a known flaw in this motherboard, requiring a BIOS update.  Okay, let's update the BIOS.  Umm...  Where's the new BIOS?  Searching on Foxconn's website seems to indicate there is no such motherboard.  Great.

Luckily, Google came to the rescue again.  You can get the latest BIOS here.

Next problem:  How to install the damned thing.  They have a DOS-based flash utility here, and they expect you to make a bootable floppy to execute it.  I ask you, who the heck actually builds a system with a freakin' floppy drive these days?  Luckily, these folks have the answer.  I downloaded their bootable CD image, and followed their instructions to add the DOS flash utility and BIOS binary to the ISO, which I then burnt to disk.

One more problem:  When I booted up into the DR-DOS CD, I was presented with my old friend, Pause.exe, who said, "Strike any key to continue . . ."  I struck a key.  Nothing happened.  I struck another, and still nothing happened.  Seems I forgot that DOS wasn't going to support my USB keyboard.  D'oh!

Thankfully, this motherboard has PS2 ports.  I dug out an old PS2-based Microsoft Natural Keyboard, plugged it in, and struck a key.  That took me to an A:\> prompt. 

One note for anybody who may be playing along with the home edition of our game:  In case you don't notice when the CD driver loads, the CD gets mounted at R:.  So switch to the R: drive (by typing R: followed by enter), and then type the filename of the flash utility followed by the full name of the BIOS binary, e.g. AFU860H.EXE 58GW1P34.BIN followed by enter.  Then just follow the prompts.  Note that you cannot save a backup of your existing BIOS, because the CD you burnt is a write-once media.

So I installed the new BIOS, and I'm happy to say my encoded video and audio is much smoother.  Big thumbs down to Foxconn for making me play Internet scavenger hunt, though.  Supposedly, their boards come with a Windows-based BIOS utility called SuperUpdate, but, like any self-respecting the geek, the first thing I do when I get a new piece of hardware is throw away the disk full of crapware and get the latest and greatest drivers off the web.  And of course, Foxconn doesn't have SuperUpdate available for download.  Grrrr.