[Silverhazesurfer]

First, the third party program seems to be something like driver doctor. Its job is to get you to do exactly that, pay them. Like the fake antivirus programs, these are garbage. Uninstall it, fast.

Now, on to the board. I did a google search on American megatrends bios update and came up with this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Amer...w=1442&bih=839

I ran into the same problem you did, the BIOS update agent. Yeah, remove that. No good can come from it.

Thinking a bit, I clicked on the Images for the search. I was going to work up this big long thing about ID the board, chip and blah blah blah. That's when I clicked on a picture that I figured I could link to and came upon this:

http://www.home-computer-support.org...ends-bios.html

I only flipped through some of the links there, but it seems like it could help. Upon further skimming, it seems to direct you to the download utility to get the prog to ID the board and get the proper update.

Hope it helps.

[Abarbarian]

Top find in a Bing search from Arch with FF gets me

http://www.asrock.com/mb/download.as...GS%20UCC&o=All

Seems they have bios updates as recently as 9/22/2011

[jwhiz]

Hi all,

I did get rid of that agent thing (what is American Megatrends thinking?)

After a bit of random noodling, I did finally find the correct page for my board on the ASRock site (I have an N68C-GS UCC board, with support for AMD 2+, and an NVidia GeForce 7025/nforce 630a chipset). (I emailed myself the link, was on desktop, can find again if anyone interested).

After downloading, unzipping and saving both DOS and ROM versions of what appeared to be the latest updates (yes, last year, 2011, but one at top of the list appeared to be a version later than one showing in the BIOS itself) I saved them to FAT formatted devices, which the system recognized in the BIOS. However, neither was recognized as a BIOS update so m'neh.

I then tried the "repair" version of reinstalling XP. M'neh.

In the meantime, I was able to boot from Puppy on a stick (I like saying that) and was able to use the system burner from there. I also reformatted the Seagate external drive to get rid of software that was crashing XP, and backed up all my folders and files from Puppy. I also did a test burn and got a successful burned CD, able to read, and was also able to read a burned DVD-DL that I burned on a netbook with the external burner.

So - seemed like a Windows issue? - I wiped out the system hard drive completely and am now laboriously reinstalling apps and files, after first doing as many XP updates and patches as I could from a CD and getting anti-naughty stuff installed and up to date (and scanning) before plugging into modem.

Guess what - burner works now - successful test burn of files from backup drive.

Hooray! Went you can't fix stuff by tossing and buying new, you gotta dig and dig...and when it works I'm so happy. Happy la la la la la la la lol.