OK, this post is just for nerds; specifically nerds that have an ASUS EeePC 900A that they want to flash the BIOS on. I’m only posting this so that if they run a Google search for tips on how to do this, I can save them from some of the problems I ran into. I’ll start with what to do, then give the backstory:

  1. Format a USB drive as FAT (AKA FAT16, but not FAT 32, that won’t work!)
  2. Find the BIOS file on the ASUS website, and name it 900A.ROM (the all caps is necessary, so don’t give it a lowercase extension)
  3. Plug the USB drive into the port on the left side of your computer- it doesn’t seem to work if it’s on the right side
  4. Reboot and hit Alt-F2 when the POST screen comes up to start the BIOS Update
  5. Profit!
OK, you might not profit, but you should get an updated BIOS.
Here’s the backstory:
I was trying to switch my 900A over to use Windows 7. I’ve run it as a Hackintosh and with a few different flavors of Linux. I was going to roll with it as an XP machine, but had problems finding drivers, and decided that Windows 7 might have better hardware support. Well, I was right, and it installed and runs perfectly (even Aero, but if you haven’t upgraded to 2GB RAM like I did, that may not work). The problem was that when I set it up as a Hackintosh, I had to downgrade the BIOS to 301 or some similar old revision, and I’ve read that battery life is greatly improved with a newer BIOS. So I downloaded the latest BIOS Update utility off the web, ran it under XP SP3 compatibility mode (after installing the ACPI service), and found that it simply didn’t work. I suspect that the BIOS I had was so old, that it didn’t allow the BIOS update utility to work. So I then tried downloading a new BIOS off the ASUS website and flashing, but ran into issues with improperly formatted USB drives, lowercase filenames, using the wrong port, using an SD card instead of a USB drive, etc. The process works great, it’s just that the 900A is very particular about how the BIOS needs to be updated. Hope that helps!