BleepingComputer.com: Can't upgrade BIOS

Trying to upgrade BIOS on HP laptop w/ Vista Home Premium, Phoenix BIOS. Downloaded BIOS upgrade from HP website, sp42853.exe, and when it executes, gets to a point where Quanta.vbe shows up in Notepad with 6 lines of random characters. I can only close the window, then the Phoenix Winflash splash screen appears with options of "Flash BIOS" and "Exit". When I flash the BIOS, I get an error " Cannot locate file BIOS.WPH. Must locate file to continue." The only option is "OK". Then Windows comes up saying that the program did not install properly, Do I want to install with default settings, or do I want to say it installed correctly? Installing with default settings does not work. My Bios is version F.07, latest version is F.32. This BIOS upgrade was supposed to take care of periodic freeze ups according to HP tech support. I've had to recover from the "upgrade" several times with System Restore. One time I tried installing the upgrade, and my computer would reboot & shutdown every 2 minutes on its own unless you clicked on something in which case it shut down immediately! I've talked to 6 HP technicians and 3 Costco concierge tech support people about this so far and cannot find a solution yet! I believe that the quanta.vbe file is opening with the wrong program, but I have not been able to change the file association in Vista!

Sometimes, when you have a big jump in version numbers, it can screw up. You should try to update incrementally
F.7 to F.32 is a pretty big leap

This post has been edited by garmanma: 12 April 2009 - 11:02 AM