My laptop is a few years old and out of warrantty, and ive been thinking of doing some mods to it...

The first would be to flash the BIOS to a more generic one (phoenix) rather than the one than the OEM provides (HP/Compaq).

Anyone ever do this with any luck? Any suggestions? (other than be careful/this could mess up your system)

thanks!

I don't expect you will find a good BIOS for it. I have an old HP ZT1000 laptop, and if I try to boot from the Windows Vista DVD, then it will blue screen. During the Vista beta test, I submitted a bug about the error, and Microsoft said that it could be fixed with a BIOS update. Of course the newest BIOS that HP provides if from 2002, and there is no chance of them ever updating it.

I just installed Ubuntu on that laptop, and it works pretty good.

Yeah good luck trying to find a generic one. There are so many different model laptops from HP I would be scared to count them all. Plus the chance of bricking it.