The first issue was with the wireless keyboard and mouse, which refused to work after booting the generated CD to update the BIOS. I have then connected a wired keyboard and went successfully through all the bios upgrade process.

On restart, windows vista had no audio. I first tried entering the BIOS setup, loading the default settings, save and exit. Still no audio.

So then I figured out inside the Control Panel -> Audio settings that the default audio output was set to High Definition speakers (which I don’t have — yet … So I just made the normal speakers the default option (right-click) and it was done.

Don’t ask me how the BIOS changed my audio default settings within Windows Vista… weird O.S…