BIOS-Mods has grown over the last ten years to be the largest BIOS Update and Modification Resource on the internet. Started in 2001, it has grown to be the largest site for taking requests and completing motherboard BIOS modifications through our forums, live chat interface, and digital resources. After changing administration in 2009, the growth in community support in our forums has been overwhelmingly positive. During this month, (December 2011), our traffic levels exceeded the bandwidth available on our current servers, and we purchased dedicated servers so that our community could continue to grow without limitation.

We invite our community users to take an active part in our forums. As we continue to add new experienced moderators, writers, and contributors to our team, we would like to extend an invitation to our members to get involved in serving over 100,000 visitors a month and counting. Below are some ways in which you can help contribute to our community.
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• Become a moderator – We actively recruit new moderators who can moderate our forums and contribute to our daily BIOS modification requests. Even if you have no experience in modifying BIOS images, our current staff and moderators will help ensure you get the resources and training you need to contribute.
• Join our writing staff - If you are a talented writer and are a computer enthusiast of any kind, we welcome new writers to contribute user reviews of new hardware, software, and other technology news. If you aren’t interested in writing articles, perhaps you may enjoy writing tutorials in our forums.

Dear Community,

For nearly 10 hours on Thursday, November 18th, 2011, the BIOS-Mods servers went offline unexpectedly. Our hosting provider had turned off our server after seeing a “large number” of connections to the site. The site went offline without notification, and our community was not informed of the downtime mainly because we weren’t informed either.

While we are looking into a possible DDoS attack or similar spamming attack, we appreciate your patience. BIOS-Mods has had a very reputable history of maintaining a 99% plus uptime rating, and we want to keep it this way. In order to ensure we can keep the community active, please be responsible and report any suspicious activity if seen in our forums. We are hoping this is an isolated incident, but we are still investigating into the root cause of the server overload.

We too are disappointed with how our service providers handled the situation, and we are considering changing service providers to avoid such situations in the future.

Thank you for your continued support of the BIOS-Mods community. If you have any concerns or questions regarding the site downtime or other relevant concerns, please do not hesitate to send us a message via our contact form, which we will promptly reply to.

Regards,
Chris a.k.a. “TheWiz”
BIOS-Mods Administrator

As we continue our quest to enhance users BIOSes, a new general technique has emerged that has proven more successful than previously thought. Coined Retail BIOS matching, many of us here at BIOS-Mods have had great success unlocking motherboards that share similar characteristics to other retail boards. This concept is a rather new approach, as people were advised against it because the odds were so little of a successful flash.

So what has changed that is redefining this technique? The first major change is that BIOS developers are now programing in languages such as C over the traditional ASM model. This is true especially in CPU Upgrading, where AMD AGESA is written in C and contains a wrapper for vendor written code. This is a significant change because now we are seeing a new scope of coding where manufacturers simply tie their code into a wrapper or a DLL. As the source code becomes more universal, manufactueres simply concern themselves with the details, while the underlying source stays the same. With the evolution of coding in C, DLLs have also made their way into the BIOS. Looking at the bigger picture, with developers merging to a common middleground it has made modding even more realistic as certain BIOS ROMs have become more “compatible” and interchangable with others. Referring back to the AGESA module as an example, versions 3.x and up are now upgradable from almost any other BIOS, which means upgrading to future versions of Phenom on older BIOSes has become quite a reality.
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Hey Everyone

We bring good news for you all!

We have spent the last couple of days working out how to optimize the sites CSS and Javascript to improve page load times and overall site performance. I am happy to report that with the help of a fantastic little piece of software called W3Compiler , we have been successful. We have ran a website optimization report using www.websiteoptimization.com before and after using the compressed java and css. Here are the results for different connection speeds with the 1st figure before optimization and the 2nd figure after optimization:-

14.4K – 267.81 seconds 179.94 seconds
28.8K – 143.50 seconds 96.67 seconds
33.6K – 125.75 seconds 84.78 seconds
56K – 83.13 seconds 56.23 seconds
ISDN 128K – 38.78 seconds 26.52 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps – 20.90 seconds 14.54 seconds

As you can see , this is a fair performance increase and is quite significant for our users on slower internet connections.

We have given the site a quick look over to make sure none of the css or javascript has broken and all seems OK. However , if you notice any issues on the site which were not happening 5 minutes ago , please PM me (1234s282), TheWiz or a member of the moderation team immediately (although it would be best to PM me as im the one who has made the changes)

Well enjoy the performance increase and reduced page load times
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