There are two fatal questions in life:

• How hard can it be?
• What could go wrong?

Recently both of these exploded in my lap...much to my annoyance. So I upgraded the innards of my desktop recently to all sorts of new shininess, including an Asus P6T motherboard. I've been buying Asus motherboards for a while now, good track record, does the job, recommended by many.

So there I was, shiny new components installed and a few hours of Mass Effect 2 in full HD under my belt. Fun times.

Then I thought...let's upgrade the BIOS.

What could go wrong?

Death and destruction, it seems. Like a good and paranoid computer user I backed up the existing settings - after all, it's what you do, eh? So I duly run the Asus update tool, which reports that the update didn't work. Fine, I thought, never mind.

Turned it off, had some food. As you do.

Turned it on again - blankness. Turned it off and on again - blankness. Took everything out - blankness. How hard can it be?

Nice one there, Asus...your hardware can be brought to its knees by your own update software. One new motherboard later I'm giving any updates a wide berth. My point? A manufacturer shouldn't really provide the tools to destroy its own products - it's somewhat sloppy engineering, particularly if you don't give some sort of early warning or better recovery options.

Even simpler - if it can reduce my system to a cutting edge paperweight, give me a little heads up.