Flashing the BIOS is a painless exercise provided you have a few basic steps in place first.
If you are subject to Black outs or Brown outs and this is a common occurrence don't do it unless you have a UPS between the mains and computer, loosing power while the BIOS is being written to the CMOS Chip will effectively kill your M'Board well at the very least you'll have to get a replacement BIOS Chip as you will not be able to re-flash it if it isn't properly loaded.
The only other thing that you MUST remember is that you do need the correct version of the BIOS BIN file to Flash your BIOS but if you get the wrong one you'll be told that you have and asked do you still wish to proceed. You do so at your own risk and you must know that you are unlikely to be able to undo the damage that you will do by installing the wrong BIOS Flash files. Again if you do this you'll have to replace the BIOS Chip which while time consuming waiting for one to arrive is o big deal.
I've personally Flashed several K of BIOS on computers and only had one problem when I was doing the flash a truck hit a power pole blacking out the area and not allowing the program to finish writing the necessary files now I always use a UPS just to be on the safe side and since I've had one available for this work I've never actually need it as the power has always stayed on. But I would prefer to be on the safe side.
With SP2 and any Intel P4 you should Flash the BIOS before actually applying SP2 as most times the computer will not restart after the installation of the Service Pack. Of course if you got a XP CD with SP2 already on it you didn't have that opportunity so do it now.
