Updating Acer Ferrari x64 Ultimate with new BIOS

Acer refuses to provide a 64 bit winphlash. I finally figured out a quick and easy solution (not wanting to buy a USB floppy). Acer adamantly refuses to acknowledge that 64 bit users want to update their BIOS. And the Ferrari 4000 doesn’t support booting from a USB flash key.

So I figured it out. Ingredients, hardware, and instructions:

Hardware

1. Acer Ferrari 4000

2. USB Flash Drive

3. Vista 32 bit DVD

Instructions

1. download the BIOS from ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/ferrari_4000/vista/BIOS/ 

2. Unzip to root of USB flash drive (mine was formatted as FAT32)

3. Unplug the USB flash drive and power down.

4. Insert the 32 bit Vista DVD and boot from it (you are not actually going to end up installing it or doing anything, this just gets you to the 32 bit WinPE environment)

5. Click through until you get to the screen with the activate online checkbox and uncheck it.

6. Connect the USB flash key to the computer

7. Press Shift-F10 to open a command prompt

8. Change to the correct drive for the USB flash drive

9. type winphlash and press enter

10. browse to the correct wph file and go for it!

11. after the flash is complete, before letting the machine restart, EJECT the DVD. (remember, nothing was installed and nothing really happened except you had access to a 32 bit WinPE environment which you needed to flash the BIOS).