Never update your BIOS unless you have a specific bug that needs fixed.

I remember a Thinkpad BIOS update ended up destroying both undervolting and overclocking, and required a "chip-clip" programmer to revert.

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wtallis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That advice doesn't hold up very well when in recent years we've had multiple instances of a BIOS update being necessary to deal with the problem of "the CPU gets fed too high a voltage and dies prematurely". That's happened to both Intel and AMD desktop CPUs.

It's a real problem that BIOS updates for consumer systems never come with a meaningful changelog, so evaluating whether a particular update is a good idea or not is basically impossible.

	▲	Guestmodinfo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I would strongly advice against buying HP laptops if you want to install linux because MX linux worked well on mine pre-owned HP, Zorin OS worked well but somehow I could not install AntiX linux and secure boot of HP troubled me too much and I could install OpenBSD on it but each time I would restart then it would kernel panic and I would havento reinstall. Combined with a long holiday when I left it at home. Now my HP is practically bricked. It is not starting

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cmckn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I built a tower several years ago and it had CPU temp issues from the start. I RMA’d the cooler, reapplied the thermal paste a couple times, reassembled the whole build, etc. It wasn’t my main machine, but every time I sat down to use it the CPU would run hot and thermal-throttle. It’s an i9 with P/E cores, so I just chalked it up to Linux power management woes. A couple months ago I was on the brink of selling it for parts, but updated the BIOS as a Hail Mary. Totally fixed it.

I guess I did “ have a specific bug that needs fixed”; I just didn’t know it!