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Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

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Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#91

Post by thisisnico »

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #84
TheHypnotist wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there was a period of time around 2000 when they had some edge, at least with gamers. Soon after that they disappeared for a while and only now i'm hearing about them again.

They lost a ton of ground right around 2006 when Core2Duo became a thing and they couldn't keep up.

I remember the K8, Almost every gamer I knew had one. Everybody was rooting for AMD at the time. They were the king. Dual core, 64bit support, almost double the IPC of Intel, lower power than Intel, and more stable. The frequencies weren't as high. My 2.6Ghz Athlon 64 3700+ demolished many Intel CPU's. And then I remember when Core2Duo became a thing like you said. Completely ruined AMD in every benchmark. I believe that Intel had switched their architecture over to what was Pentium Mobile at the time and refactored it. Prescott was optimized for frequency, but the IPC was terrible, as was the heat. We had 4GHZ CPU's back in 2004.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#93

Post by LeifCarrotson »

twobat wrote: post #44
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #28

I will admit that I do not understand that move; especially so if it is a cost cutting measure. Then again I remember arguing with a VP that storage is cheap and email size limits are draconian enough already. She was not pleased. Maybe it is really just about the budget.

Storage is indeed cheap. Buying it through a service provider not so much.

It is still cheap, even when bought through a service provider, even after adding backup storage, and after adding any overhead incurred by having more data. True, it costs more than the $0.02/GB that a cheap, large spinning rust drive costs - perhaps a factor of 10 or 100 more, and perhaps billed monthly instead of as a capital expense.

It's cheap in comparison to the data that a business is saving. That's really expensive data. The people that created the data cost thousands of dollars per month. It would be stupid to save $0.02 if there's even a small chance that someone will need to spend $200 to rewrite a document or reverse engineer some information that they had in an email from a couple years ago. While some data - an installer for 3rd-party software, or photos/video - is pretty large, a single config file or code file that may have been perfected over months or years is just a couple kB, and it's hard to keep the latter useful without the former. And if a customer's $100,000 installation goes down for an extended period of time because you deleted their backup images to save space? You're not getting another order like that from them.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#94

Post by flyinghamster »

vardump wrote: post #9

I can't believe this. All these years I've been recommending Intel products because of their long term support. I know these boards are legacy, but does it really cost them that much to host the files for occasional downloaders? One would have thought they'd tread carefully after so many recent PR hits, but I guess not.

I've built three systems with Intel desktop boards, and only one of them survived longer than three years; the other two succumbed to Bad Capacitor Syndrome. I wonder if the caps were counterfeits, since they were (at least ostensibly) from respected Japanese manufacturers.

The survivor is a D945GCLF2 (Mini-ITX Atom board) that runs my Asterisk installation. Even it's a bit wonky, though; kernels newer than 2.6 have a weird ACPI issue that crops up when the CPU temperature is above 71 C (which normally only happens when I'm compiling a new version of Asterisk). No BIOS or kernel fix is forthcoming.

If it wasn't for the expensive-to-replace PCI telephony card, I'd chuck it for an AMD-based Mini-ITX.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#95

Post by LeifCarrotson »

josteink wrote: post #49
twobat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is indeed cheap. Buying it through a service provider not so much.

Talking to my IT department, it seems the argument is that storage is only cheap in isolation. In the real world it aggregates across products, users and hierarchies. Example email: - I want bigger mailbox to handle bigger mails incoming and outgoing. Result: bigger mailbox. - Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000. - Also: bigger mail-server backups. - Also: bigger desk…

So your company refuses to spend...1000 x $0.1 = $100 to avoid deleting or dropping emails? That seems incredibly short-sighted.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#96

Post by iwalton3 »

nobrains wrote: post #26

This will lead to people downloading potentially infected drivers from unofficial sites.

For anyone on Windows stuck doing this, I've had decent luck with the Snappy Driver Installer. (https://sdi-tool.org/)

The project is open source, can store a complete collection of all drivers offline, and can detect and update drivers. Please do note that you should always take a system restore point, as I have had a few issues with graphics drivers installed with the tool in the past.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#97

Post by smileybarry »

rb808 wrote: post #81
lullibrulli wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately the same applies here: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/28273/BIOS-Update-...

OK I see that is for LGA1155 boards released 8 years ago, which isn't great but I'm not sure you need BIOS updates still.

3 years ago I needed a "beta"[1] BIOS update for my 2012 Ivy Bridge motherboard because it shipped with EFI and every NVIDIA GPU since Pascal (2016) only works in UEFI mode. That machine is still perfectly good for modern games. If I had chosen to upgrade my GPU later and Gigabyte did the same as Intel now, I would be SOL.

[1] Gigabyte used to mark BIOS updates as "beta" when it's past their time (in 2012 Gigabyte terms: a year) to provide less warranty & support in case something goes wrong. They're as stable as the main versions.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#98

Post by flyinghamster »

userbinator wrote: post #36

Microsoft did a similar thing silently to their downloads[1] and KB articles, but fortunately the majority of it --- if not all --- has been archived somewhere. Now if only archive.org would make it all searchable... [1] a notable example being "Calculator Plus", a 9x/2K/XP-style calculator with some enhancements, but the name has since been reused for a horrible bloated and slow buggy "app".

Windows Live Mail (the replacement for Outlook Express) is a good example. My dad uses it on his old Dell desktop, and it got carried over when he got hit with the Windows 10 dark pattern "upgrade".

Now he has a new laptop, but we can't download Windows Live Mail (unless we want to risk getting it from a dodgy site), and he won't even consider Thunderbird. Argh.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#99

Post by smileybarry »

flyinghamster wrote: post #98
userbinator wrote: post #36

Microsoft did a similar thing silently to their downloads[1] and KB articles, but fortunately the majority of it --- if not all --- has been archived somewhere. Now if only archive.org would make it all searchable... [1] a notable example being "Calculator Plus", a 9x/2K/XP-style calculator with some enhancements, but the name has since been reused for a horrible bloated and slow buggy "app".

Windows Live Mail (the replacement for Outlook Express) is a good example. My dad uses it on his old Dell desktop, and it got carried over when he got hit with the Windows 10 dark pattern "upgrade". Now he has a new laptop, but we can't download Windows Live Mail (unless we want to risk getting it from a dodgy site), and he won't even consider Thunderbird. Argh.

If the download is digitally-signed by Microsoft, you can download it via a temporary VM and verify the installer signature. Since Live Mail is around the Vista era it should be signed.

Re: Intel desktop board BIOS update end-of-life

#100

Post by Wowfunhappy »

lonelappde wrote: post #39
vardump wrote: post #9

I can't believe this. All these years I've been recommending Intel products because of their long term support. I know these boards are legacy, but does it really cost them that much to host the files for occasional downloaders? One would have thought they'd tread carefully after so many recent PR hits, but I guess not.

Is 15 years not long term enough support for you?

I'm not asking for support. If I have a problem, I don't expect to be able to call Intel and ask for help. All I'm asking is for some way to update the BIOS without hunting down unofficial download links from shady websites.

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter if the hardware is 15, 30, or 70 years old. These are not large files. Keeping up some old downloads should not be too much to ask of Intel.

If Intel would like to release all copyright claims to their old BIOS's and officially (!) designate the Internet Archive or a similar organization as their new caretaker, I'd be fine with that, because I'd know where to go if I ever needed an old BIOS. What I do not want is to have start hunting down links from malware-infested file-hosting sites.

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