I had an old HP Pavilion that tenants abandoned when they moved. It had 192 MB RAM, a 400 MHz Celeron, a 9.3 GB hard disk, a floppy drive, and originally shipped with Windows 98. It was missing the network card. The tenants had upgraded to XP Professional.
It now has 384 MB RAM and a 200 GB hard disk ($20 from Free Geek), a working Intel 10/100 NIC, and Lubuntu. The RAM, NIC, and a couple other things were leftover parts I had around the house. There are two empty PCI slots for other NICs or stuff that might be useful. I'd like to add a USB 2.0 card, because it has two USB ports and I'm sure they're only 1.1. It works great and boots incredibly fast, albeit a tad slow in operation because of the ancient CPU. However, there is an issue with the additional RAM. According to HP it can take up to 128 MB PC133 cards in each of its two RAM slots. It had a 128 and a 64, so I decided to swap the 64 for a 128. However, all I had around the house was some 256 MB sticks. So I just stuck them in and booted it. The BIOS recognized the RAM but gave an error message "upper memory limit exceeded, E953." The original XP would not boot, nor could I get any Linux OS to install on the new 200 GB hard disk. So I replaced one of my 256 MB sticks with the 128 MB stick. XP on the original hard disk still wouldn't boot, but Lubuntu installed and works fine on the new disk. Using top I find that Lubuntu is apparently using all 384 MB, in spite of the BIOS error message. Nevertheless, I'm trying to find out if there might be a BIOS update available. The BIOS is Phoenix 4.0 version 6.0.J. For Windows users there is a free program that will get the required information and tell you if there is an update. Absent this program, apparently I need the serial number in order to find out if there are updates. Google told me to use dmidecode, but all dmidecode tells me is "I see nothing." All I can figure out is what the boot screen tells me: Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0.J 4/28/99 (C) 1999 by Hewlett-Packard, Inc., Rev. 1.12 Core version 4.06 Can anyone suggest alternatives to dmidecode for figuring out details of the BIOS? Or does anyone know more about Phoenix BIOS updates? _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
