Ok guys, I'm a bit unhappy about what I just did, here goes:

I always get a "BIOS handoff failed" message on my laptop whenever linux is booting up. Frankly I don't even know what that means but I decided to re-flash the BIOS on my laptop since I've had it for like 3 years and never upgraded it. What the heck right?

Bad idea. I go to ASUS website and grab the latest and upgrade. I still got the "BIOS handoff failed" message so I go back to ASUS website since I was bored to check details on the latest BIOS. Apparently the only addition was "Remove PCI prefetch" wtf!? That's good? Why did they remove that? So after a quick google I find this article. Apparently I missed the news when it came out

I'm kind of bummed out about this. Basically my question is, now that my chipset doesn't support prefetch anymore, does anyone know how much of a performance loss I can expect across the bus? Is this negligible or crippling? I don't use my laptop that much anymore so it's not a huge deal and I'm not using it right now. Basically all I know is prefetch is good and efficient, but I really have no idea to the extent of it.

Thank you for reading.

Yikes! Perhaps ASUS support will offer you an older BIOS if you call and complain about you hand-off problem. You know they have it on hand to give out. Perhaps NVidia will gove you some money towards a new laptop since they had to disable a feature that helped convince you to buy it (performance)