Upgrading Bios..

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June 28th, 2004, 11:51 AM
.:front2back:.

Upgrading Bios..

Well i'm doing some upgrades to a friends Box, anyhow i'm not to sure on the Bios though.
The current Bios is
Award Modular Bios v4.51PG
The question is can i flash the Bi0s with this..
Award Modular Bios v6.00PG
As it supports winXP
(Os that friend wants installed.)

And if the specs for the Box are needed then here they are..

Quote:

Operating System:Windows 98 Version 4.10 build 1034.2222 A
Processor:Pentium III 300 MHz (Serial No.: 0000067300013224F9C6FA
Cache:L1 cache: 16 KB code, 16 KB data L2 cache: 512 KB
Front side bus speed:66 MHz
System Ram:327,120 KB

Any and all help would be much appreciated..

cheers
F2B:.
June 28th, 2004, 01:30 PM
Nokia

I dont think it would be a good move installing XP on that box no matter what BIOS you have.

As you know it quite a taxing O/S and with a 300Mhz P3 and a 66 FSB you wont do him any favours.

It would prob be OK when you first install it but when he adds all the software, virus scanner,firewall, games etc, it would just grind to a halt!

Be better off upgrading the comp or sticking with 98!
June 28th, 2004, 01:59 PM
.:front2back:.

Ok thanks for this piece of info Nokia..
I was mainly uncertain about the Bi0s..
And i decided to do some added investigation work, so i pulled a Hard Drive from another box running XP, inserted it into my mate's Box and booted it up, and it ran fine..
But once you went past the log in stage it started throwing up all sorts of errors, it said that a .dll file for Nortan was either Corrupt or missing, and it also complained that Zone Alarm was corrupt..
So i pulled the drive back out inserted it back into my Box and guess what No errors, so i guess you were right about it complaining when more software was installed..
So i'm gonna give XP the miss, and i'll try and educate him in Debian or some other *nix flavour..
with 98 as an added dual boot option..

cheers
F2B:.
June 28th, 2004, 03:37 PM
scriptkiddie18

where can i flash my current BIOS, i've never done it before...the current one that i got is COMPAQ - 10503
...if i flash it, it may also fix a problem with my hard drive, whenever i reinstall XP, i cant access my slave drive without formatting and it only shows as 35GB instead 80GB, i found a WD boot disk which installes some life tools and it starts right when my computer starts, but when i do that i also have to format my drive and then its all ok til the next install of a new OS...so i just need to flash my COMPAQ - 10503 BIOS, anyone know a site?
June 28th, 2004, 04:11 PM
thadbme

Not quite sure how the Compaq site is laid out, but here is a link to the compaq support and drivers page. I'm not sure how the Compaq does the bios either, but usually you just go into DOS, armed with a floppy with the bios on it and execute it.

My Gigabyte board you can flash from windows, which is basically a really easy utility for anyone. Anyhoo hope this helps.
June 28th, 2004, 05:21 PM
SwordFish_13

Hi

"By grind to a halt!........ it was not like what you just experienced......It will work but the Computer will become slow..Dead Slow...... it will work you can install XP ....If he is hell bent on XP you can give him XP.........it's like you should not do that but you cound do that.:).....just by just pulling a HarD disk from another Computer and putting it on another computer will not work most of the time.....until they both have the Same Configuration......i am sure that what you are experiencing..

I have worked on worse System than it haveing Windows NT....My first Computer was Pentium 1....with 8 MB RAM and i had NT installed :(

My Personal Advice Stick To windows 98 or maybe windows ME not higher than that....
.....

And maximum Processor and Disk Capacity that can be used on a computer depends on both combination of motherboard and BIOS ..and not only BIOS...so don't get any wrong ideas here.......

Here .:front2back:. you can Check for the upgardes simply click on BIOS Agent will identify the BIOS on your system and provide you with all of the information that you will need to order your new BIOS..Max Upgradable Verson Etc...Etc.

Flash BIOS upgrade

and scriptkiddie18 you will have to know what bois make is(t Aware.....AMI, AST....etc.)...You will have to check when your Computer starts i don't know which BIOS COMPAQ uses in it's computers....

Remember Flashing is a very risky business..there is nothng you can do if it goes wrong but to change the motherboard.......While in process you should make sure thet power is not disconnected because it means new Motherboard .....

-Good Luck--
June 28th, 2004, 06:10 PM
nihil

Hi,

Well, F2B, with those specs, I would say that WIN98 SE would be my OS of choice. WinME should be OK as you have more than 256Mb of RAM, but I am assuming that your friend shuts down after each session? (ME does tend to suffer from memory leaks). Please do not attempt to run WinXP..............it will work, but very badly...........so I might have to bring you before the High Council on a charge of "operating system abuse" :D ................like you would not be giving it a fair chance?

Scriptkiddie~................you need to be careful with stuff from the "big names" as they tend to have custom BIOSES (to cut down on support costs) Look at the installation/analysis software from your HDD supplier...........they usually have a software solution..............something like EZDrive?..........I have a PI/133MHz Digital Venturis, that works quite well with a 60Gb and 14.4Gb HDD configuration. You might like to check what Compaq say that upgrade will support? it is better to have your hardware supported by the BIOS, but there is no point in taking the risk of an upgrade if it does not do anything particularly for you?

Swordfish~..................your problem was 8Mb of RAM...............that is really a Win3x/DOS configuration.............Win95 will work............but expect serious instability................NT4.0 really needs 32Mb absolute minimum, and 64Mb+ out of choice..............processor wise it is not that aggressive...................I have run it quite happily on PI/90-PI/166 machines.

Just a few thoughts
June 28th, 2004, 06:54 PM
Nokia

Quote:

I would say that WIN98 SE would be my OS of choice. WinME should be OK as you have more than 256Mb of RAM

System spec's aside, I would use Win 98SE over ME anyday!!

IMHO Millenium has to be the biggest ****-up of an O/S that has ever been produced!
June 28th, 2004, 07:32 PM
SwordFish_13

Quote:

Swordfish~..................your problem was 8Mb of RAM...............that is really a Win3x/DOS configuration.............Win95 will work............but expect serious instability................NT4.0 really needs 32Mb absolute minimum, and 64Mb+ out of choice..............processor wise it is not that aggressive...................I have run it quite happily on PI/90-PI/166 machines.

I know i needed more RAM But as i said it was my first System..and at that time Hardware... Especially RAM was very very Costly...and i somehow Loved NT as a OS :D....ok ok to tell the truth it wasen't by choice i had to run several Back Office Products that only run on NT(server) at that time....i was very very slow .......i didn't had much of a choice:(

and about "Windows NT processor wise not being that aggressive" very True it worked resanobly good on 64 MB RAM.....

Now RAM and other Hardware are very cheap as compared to those days....and i am very glad about that...

--Good Luck--
June 28th, 2004, 07:40 PM
nihil

Hey, Nokia,

Quote:

IMHO Millenium has to be the biggest ****-up of an O/S that has ever been produced!

I think that the problem was the way in which M$ marketed it, and the industry responded?

I have it running stably on the following:

PII/333MHz, 384MB PC100 RAM
PII/450MHz, 384Mb PC100 RAM
Duron/1.3GHz, 512 Mb PC133RAM

It will not run stably on a PII/266MHz with 128Mb of EDO RAM or on a P4/1.7GHz with 764Mb of RAMBUS PC 800.

It is mostly RAM as far as I have seen, from my experiments, and looking at other peoples' machines.

I think that we both agree that Win98SE is the best of the "home OS" offerings from Microsoft?

Remember folks................look at the WHOLE system..................if you have nasty onboard video.......it will steal your RAM from the OS, now, 64/1024 doesn't matter on my XP Pro box, but on a 128Mb RAM box, that is a BIG overhead?

Cheers
June 28th, 2004, 08:31 PM
Spyder32

Quote:

IMHO Millenium has to be the biggest ****-up of an O/S that has ever been produced!

Agreed and can relate to ;) I'm uninstalling WinMe and adding a flavour of linux probably, if not then Win2k. I hear it's fairly decent.

Quote:

I think that we both agree that Win98SE is the best of the "home OS" offerings from Microsoft?

Agreed again. My Win98 box is extremely stable, and when kept up-to-date in term's of update's (which isn't hard) is as good stability wise as my OpenBSD baby. Both have an uptime of 41 day's as of right now.
June 28th, 2004, 08:43 PM
Nokia

Agreed!

Ive never managed to have Me 100% stable on any high end platform. I find it seems to cope well enough with things like celeron,durons on budget systems though!.
June 28th, 2004, 08:48 PM
nihil

Well Spyder~

Quote:

Both have an uptime of 41 day's as of right now.

WinME will not work like that IMHO. You need to shut it down and re-boot every day, or the memory leaks will getcha!

Do try Win2K, it is an excellent OS, but will not support older games, or DOS apps that well.

:D
June 28th, 2004, 08:53 PM
SwordFish_13

Hi

Quote:

Agreed and can relate to I'm uninstalling WinMe and adding a flavour of linux probably, if not then Win2k. I hear it's fairly decent.

You got a Win 2000 Fan right here...i am using windows 2000 Advanced Server since( i don't exactly remember it was a long time back). before that i used WindowsNT. w2k gave me the flexibility to use FAT 16 ,FAT 32 and NTFS and Primary partation can now be made larger than 2 GB...was good performence wise(because i don't have a state of the art high end PC ;)) .....

I don't like windows 98 and Me because the running program is so tightely bound to the system that sometimes a error in some running program/process makes the whole OS de-stable.....thats the only thing i have against them...and thats why i stopped using them.........and XP way over my Computer Configuration.......

All-in-all Windows 2000 Advanced Server is a good....Stable OS...... i wouldn't let go of it as yet....

--Good Luck--
June 29th, 2004, 05:01 AM
.:front2back:.

Sorry i'm a bit late Replying to all the knew Post's, but i had to go to sleep i was getting Tired and Coffee wasn't doing it's job..

Quote:

"By grind to a halt!........ it was not like what you just experienced......It will work but the Computer will become slow..Dead Slow...... it will work you can install XP ....If he is hell bent on XP you can give him XP.........it's like you should not do that but you cound do that......just by just pulling a HarD disk from another Computer and putting it on another computer will not work most of the time.....until they both have the Same Configuration......i am sure that what you are experiencing..

I found that it installed alright, then once you started installing stuff like Nortan, ZoneAlarm, then installed a few games it just became a little to unstable for my liking..

Quote:

Here .:front2back:. you can Check for the upgardes simply click on BIOS Agent will identify the BIOS on your system and provide you with all of the information that you will need to order your new BIOS..Max Upgradable Verson Etc...Etc.

Flash BIOS upgrade

That was a pretty handy little link you shot me swordfish. I found the right upgrade in the end, and i'm glad that i didn't use the Upgrade that i was planning on using, as it turned out to be the wrong one :(

Quote:

Well, F2B, with those specs, I would say that WIN98 SE would be my OS of choice. WinME should be OK as you have more than 256Mb of RAM, but I am assuming that your friend shuts down after each session? (ME does tend to suffer from memory leaks). Please do not attempt to run WinXP..............it will work, but very badly...........so I might have to bring you before the High Council on a charge of "operating system abuse" ................like you would not be giving it a fair chance?

Well Nihil in the end i partitioned the Hard-Disk and i've got it running Win98Se with a dual boot of Red Hat 7.2..
And my friend isn't the sort of person that shut's the Box down when he's finished..

Quote:

so I might have to bring you before the High Council on a charge of "operating system abuse"

Now that wouldn't be the first time that's happened..

cheers
F2B:.
June 29th, 2004, 10:04 PM
scriptkiddie18

hey swordfish i used that utility and it sux at least for my current computer, but take a look...

Your BIOS Report Results

BIOS ID: Unknown
OEM Sign-On: None
BIOS Date: 05/03/01
BIOS Type: Other
Chipset: AMD 700E rev 18
Super I/O: VIA 686 rev 64 found at port 14h
OS: WinXP
BIOS ROM Socket: No
BIOS ROM Size: 256K
Memory Installed: 384 MB
Memory Max: 1536 MB
CPU: AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz MAX: 2000 Mhz

...this is some weird **** man, hey nihil EZDrive sounds familiar but cant remember what that is again...iand i tried compaq drivers and support site for my Compaq Presario 7000US, but u see mine is custom built...so it really isnt that model #....also tried that boot menu (F10) but it doesnt say what BIOS it is under main tab...
June 30th, 2004, 10:05 PM
SwordFish_13

hi scriptkiddie18

Quote:

hey swordfish i used that utility and it sux at least for my current computer, but take a look...

That utility was not for you ..i specifafically said for .:front2back:. :)

see......

Quote:

Here .:front2back:. you can Check for the upgardes simply click on BIOS Agent will identify the BIOS on your system and provide you with all of the information that you will need to order your new BIOS..Max Upgradable Verson Etc...Etc.

Sorry for the misunderstanding but that utility will work only for Award BIOS.....

Goo into the BIOS Setup in your PC ( it's generally DEL key on startup don't know about COMPAQ ) in the setup it must be written on top generally is......

Or Call the COMPAQ Customes Care /Help Desk or something they might be able to help you ...

--Good Luck--
June 30th, 2004, 10:33 PM
nihil

Scriptkiddie~

Please open another thread for this one...........you are talking Compaq............and another BIOS?

It is F10 to get into Compaq BIOS setup :D

I am only asking this because Compaq kit is very common, particularly old, ex-corporate ones?.........well I have 4...........286,386,486,PI............biggest single manufacturer representation in my museum :D

I have a load of Compaq diagnostics and the like.........all legit. and public domain..........

I would like to help, but I do believe that we need another thread?

Cheers