Awesome. thanks again and much appreciated. but I spent the better half of the night trying to flash the bios and i'm just trying to figure out how to go about doing that now. is there any utility that any of you use to flash the custom rom? or is there any way to splice this rom into the bios update tool from acer? I tried using the recovery guide here on the website for the insyde bios. but was never able to get the laptop to try and grab the renamed bios file from the flash drive prior to POST