Flashing in a party?

Misleading title again :) I faced a problem after I got my new Logitech G15 keyboard. I promptly unpacked it, plugged it into my laptop to see if it worked and then carried it over to the desktop with much fanfare. Unplugged the PS/2 keyboard, plugged in the G15 and booted up. Everything was fine, except that the mouse didn't work.

Now, I have a very nice 5 button PS/2 iBall optical mouse that has not given me much room to complain, so I wasn't about to give up without a fight. Plugging the PS/2 keyboard back in brought the mouse back to life, so it's obvious that the addition of the new USB keyboard was the problem, right? Back to google, and search after search brought up nothing. I finally found an IBM site that merely said that using a USB keyboard and a PS/2 mouse was not allowed on some model of theirs, but that hardly seemed to apply to me. Then it dawned upon yours truly that it may be the fault of unplugging the PS/2 keyboard rather than plugging in the USB keyboard.

Turns out that the version of the BIOS I had on my motherboard had a bug that would deactivate the PS/2 mouse if the PS/2 keyboard was unplugged. Fair enough. A BIOS update should fix that, since there is a later BIOS version that claims to eliminate this bug. Next choice - floppy based flash or WinFlash? I decided to go the WinFlash way, just because I am too lazy to unplug a floppy drive from an old desktop merely to flash the BIOS. So downloaded the BIOS, downloaded WinFlash, ran the update, rebooted.

Then, nothing.

Ooooooops... bad flash? That is a catastrophe, recovery is an involved process, that may or may not work. The status LEDs on the motherboard were all lit up and one of them was blinking. The solution is simple when I write it down, but it did take me some time to figure it out. Reboot, hold down the Insert key during the boot process and POST, then release it and hit Del to enter the BIOS settings, reset everything to normal settings, allow the OS to boot. Then you can always go and re-enter the OC'ed settings. I would have not had to go through all this had I reset the BIOS settings to normal before the flash, I think.

To jump to the end of the story, the flash worked and now I have a USB keyboard and a PS/2 mouse working just fine. Where does the party come in? DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D is the motherboard model.

"...the Opteron 165's overclocking prowess has earned it a rep for being more dangerous than Dick Cheney with a 20-gauge full of birdshot" says TechReport.com.