Dear Stan,
Chad prompts me to tell this Dell story:
On Tue, 30 Dec 2008, Chad Avery wrote:
Check out this post. There seems to be a bug with a certain Dell bios
firmware and Ubuntu 8.04 on a Dell Latitude D620.
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg900044.html
I also found this informative discussion about ACPI and it's
implementation. It does mention a " crappy Dell bios"
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=125916
I believe problems like these tend to be a shade of gray. Unless, as
Paul suggested, test, testing and retest. But you have to have the
time to do that.
But the time spent is not lost, when one posts results, it aides the
next owner of an overheated Dell D620.
eating oatmeal while four kids run around me, AUM!!!
Chad you are a lucky (and fecund :^) sob...
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 12:09 AM, Paul Flint <[email protected]> wrote:
Ok, so a few years ago I get a call from my man Jeff who tells me that
the latest version of Ubuntu is breaking Dell CD players during
installation.
I tell him he is daft, and go and investigate.
So I take a fresh machine, put the Ubuntu install CD in, power up, hit
<F12>, watch the screen clear, light on CD stops... Restart. No light on
CD. The code has killed the machine at install boot. Spooky...
We call Dell tech support.
What we found out after talking to Dell, is that the CD player microcode
was misinterperting the IDE "reset" command as the "wipe microcode"
command. Since Window$ never used the "reset" command, no one ever
noticed.
The happy ending is that once Dell support disclosed this but inherited
from their CD ROM player vendor, they cheerfully replaced all three CD
players involved.
Moral of the story - anything is possible!
BTW Chad, come visit, bring the kids!
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
(802) 479-2360
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Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
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Consilium
gratuitum .~.
valet /V\
quanti /( )\
numerantur ^^-^^
