So I get paranoid, and have run Steve Gibson tool as advised on Windows Weekly. (All Clear on my two year old SurFace Pro 4 on both Meltdown and Spectre, which is kinda impressive) But on my two desktops, I have Spectre Warning, Hardware BIOS not Updated on both machines. This is on a 3 month old MSI X99 A modern Motherboard, as well as as on a 5 year old ASUS Motherboard. The ASUS site is not very helpful on anything related to the supporting motherboard BIOS, let alone supporting my legacy Motherboards. And the MSI site suggests a Bios update may be available, but is too arcane to understand. The MSI LiveUpdate desktop tool, only suggests driver updates, no BIOS.
Basically I would think there is going to be a lot of vulnerable motherboards/BIOS out there to spectre,. Especially as Steve Gibson tool has told us. But none of these BIOS updates instructions are clear and obvious. No simple desktop utility that can be executed by normal people. So how are we to advise all the normal people about protecting their systems against this Spectre ?
I don’t many people, including myself, can afford to simply replace all their machines just cos Intel screwed up and Motherboard manufacturers not able to update 5 year old motherboard bios..