I flashed my mobo, ohh god

Hello guys, here's my system :

Asus A8N SLi premium
AMD 64bit dualcore 4200+
2gig DDR
280 gig Maxtor hard drive
7900GTX x 2
Tagan 700watt sli comlient PSU

Baiscally I was (am) having trouble in wow atm. When I turn my character the it lags and is not smooth at all. After reading the forums i learned it is a dual core problem, and come to think of it, i didn't see the problem until i recently upgraded my cpu to dual core. But I read that some people fixed this by upgrading their bios for their MB so i decided to try. (silly me)

Well i made a backup of the current version, checked to make sure i had the recommended chipset driver or latest on my mobo, then flashed the mobo to 1303. Everything went well, but when i started up it kept crashing and saying that windows was unable to start. I had the option to startup in safemode which i did at which point i got the message that new hardware was detected and software installed. since then it's behaving as normal, no problems (the problem in wow persists.)

My question is, have I messed something up horribly and was just lucky, or is that normal?

Sorry for being a noob, i never really wanted to mess around with bios before and probably wont in the future :S

Ty for help in advance.

Never flash your BIOS from Windows. Things could much easily go wrong than when you flash it at dos level.
There is a utility called EZflash in the Asus BIOS, next time use it and flash the BIOS from there.

I don't know if anything got damaged, but as long as everything is working properly now, why worry?

Also, doesn't WoW have a dual-core patch? Download that if you haven't.

Its a windows issue, not a bios issue.
You're probably best off reinstalling windows from scratch.

If it even trys to boot your probably all right.

What happens most often when your flash your bios (I have done it to many times to count) is that all your hardware settings are automatically reset. Meaning if you have two drives, one may become the boot drive while the other does not. If you had your boot sector on the second drive, guess what you won't be able to boot until you change it back in the bios. Your boot device order gets rearranged to default. It may be trying to load from a floppy drive or external device that it wouldn't have before. Your video device order gets reset also. If you have a built in video device or more than one card the order may have been reset and now it is loading the wrong device.

This is why its always very important that before you flash your bios, first go into the bios and jot down all your settings along with any special settings and timings you may have had changed, than make a bootable floppy or CD and flash from DOS. After you flash your bios than restart the computer and turn it off before it has had time to reboot completely, than turn it back on and go into the bios, meticulously put your settings back as they where.

The only problem you probably originally had was when going from single CPU to dual was just needing to go into the bios and checking that it use both CPU's instead of just one after your upgrade, that all, its a common mistake. Same thing happens often when folks go from 2CPU's to quads, the bios stays on just 2. If for some reason the bios only shows 1 CPU available after a cpu upgrade than a bios upgrade is called for. The same thing with going from 2 to 4. If your bios only shows 2 cpu's available after a quad upgrade, you need to find a newer bios that supports the new cpu. Otherwise, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Does it work without sli enabled?

Some folks are reporting dual-core issues with WoW.
Try setting the affinity to a single core via Task Mgr to see if that helps.

If it does, we can go from there.

^ You should always use plain old DOS or the built in Flasher utility (like EZ Flash or Q-Flash). Good luck.

The last time I flashed my Mobo, I forgot to shut the shares and my neighbor saw me.

Reinstall fresh... I do it every 6 months and boy!!!!- does it clean out a lot of problems!!!

as for any possable bios issues I would reset back to factory defaults and then reboot into bios and resetup your oc settings (whatever they were).

It's good that it works now, but I would seriously consider reinstalling XP. That way this would never be a problem again.

FWIW, I haven't used EZ Flash in about 3-4 years.....all BIOS upgrades have been done using the Asus updater utility. Soemtimes it ahsn't been so good at finding the latest BIOS but in such cases, I have had no problems d/l'ing it and installing it from a file using teh windows updater utility.

And yes, when downloading your BIOS file, also d/l and print out your MoBo manual. Put it in a binder or whatever then, before installing new one, go into your BIOS and mark the selected settings in your manual. The manual will list available options and use a highlighter or pen to circle the selected setting.

Then, install the new BIOS and don't let it boot to windows....go into BIOS on 1st boot and check each setting to make sure it matches what you highlighted / circled in the manual.