Has anyone here replaced their bios with any type of freeware bios such as linux bios? I was wondering if there are any pros or cons to doing this, or whether it's even worth messing with.

Unless you have a stack of compatible motherboards you are yearning to turn into worthless trash, this isn't something you should be looking at. LinuxBIOS gives you a very fast BIOS boot, but not much more that the average person would be interested in.

Because the LinuxBIOS has no per copy licensing fee, at some point it's likely that manufacturers will start using it instead of the proprietary BIOS' currently available, to save money. This will likely happen after the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project ships a few million units, as they use LinuxBIOS. With a large scale field deployment, manufacturers will be more confident in the stability of the BIOS.

In a few years, the PC you buy will come with LinuxBIOS. Pheonix/Award, EFI, Open Firmware will eventually be history. There's really no reason for them to continue to exist with modern operating systems. With virtualization, no one needs to boot a legacy OS live anymore.

Old saying goes like "don't fix a working thing". If you can boot your pc using the BIOS that's inside, which you have paid for (yes, the price of your computer includes the price of the BIOS too), and it works for you as it most probably does (since if it didn't, you would have asked after your warranty), you have absolutely no reasons to change it. You can use free operating systems since you can buy computers with no operating system at all, or when the old OS gets too old, but basically you never have a reason to change your BIOS. You aren't even supposed to update/flash it unless there's a major problem that prevents you from living. If you go and tickle it a bit, it might just as well break down and you ended up with a nonusable computer. And you'd also throw your money away, since you have paid for the working BIOS as macemoneta said, if in the future the manufacturers start putting Linux BIOS to the box you can use them, but before that it's of no use. It's not like putting Linux inside your iPod, since you could revert that and it actually might add to the functionality of the device - it's just stupid

I can't help it, I love messing with my computer. I didn't know about not updating it though, I updated my bios about a month ago. Since it's been out it's had 3 bios revisions. I don't know about not switching os's though, I had win xp on my computer and it worked fine, but I switched anyways, I just find slackware to be more fun.
thanks for the reply's, I'm not interested in frying my motherboard at this time.. although in a few months.. I was planning on upgrading my pc from 512 mb ram to 2 gigs.. but apparently with rdram it's less expensive to just build a new computer. Damn Intel.

If you had flash/eeprom device programer, you can mess your bios all you want to.

However, if you don't; like most of computer users are; you should not relay only on your DOS flash program, or even these windows flash program; to mess with a working bios.

And beware; that these device programers usually need a working computer to work with, unless you had the fancy one which can read a floppy/flash drive, at least, you must have a spare-old computer can be used.