As an administrator, there may come a time that you have to upgrade the bios. A new firmware may fix some bugs and may have new functionality. It also may be a required before you can request support from the manufacturer.
In all these cases, the first step to take is to determine the current BIOS version / firmware version. Yes: you can determine the firmware version by rebooting the computer and going into the BIOS, but in production environments this is often not recommended. 🙂
Especially for these situations, you can view the BIOS version while running Windows. There are two easy ways to determine your current firmware version.
MSINFO32
The first way is with MSINFO32. To find the BIOS version with MSINFO, do the following:
- Click Start, click Run, type MSINFO32 and press ENTER.
- In the root, System Summary, the Overview page shows the current BIOS version and date
MSINFO32 gets its data from the registry. The REGEDIT-method described below will provide you the same information
Registry
To find the BIOS version with MSINFO, do the following:
- Open REGEDIT
- Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System
In this key, SystemBiosVersion and SystemBiosDate provide you the current BIOS version of your motherboard.
Hopefully this easy guide has saved you an unnecessary reboot 🙂
