Computer Stupidity

If nobody has written a song about the programmers boredom while waiting for grep to finish it's work, they should. I swear I spend 20% of each day waiting for grep

4 1/2 more days and it's vacation time...then I'll be waiting in line instead of waiting for grep.

So, I have this old computer. I have no idea what the model of the motherboard is, or the manufacturer. I threw out the manual a long time ago and am way too lazy to take the board out of the case so that I can see the appropriate info (probably labelled on the bottom).

I do however know some of it's characteristics. It was sold to me as a Pro 1400+, which I later discovered was an AMD duron 950. I suspect it's a PC Chips board as there is a heat sync which says PC DDR 266 (the DDR 266 obviously referencing the memory, although it takes two SDRAM and two DDR (either or).

So, I look through the PC Chips web site and find one that's close M810DLU....so I pull down the bios.

I put the new bios on a bootable floppy (good luck finding one of those) and apply it to the machine.

Here's the incredibly stupid part. The bios update program WARNS me that the old bios had the tag M810D0 and the new one has the tag M810DLU. This is highlighted in red.

So, I quit and continued ... looking for a bios for M810D. I searched and searched and did not find it.

Have you guessed what I did yet? That's right, I forced the program to continue and wrote the 810DLU bios over the old one.

So, now I own a boat anchor. It's dead, resetting the bios does allow it to come up to the setup screen, but that's it. It will not boot off floppy, cd or hard disk.

NEVER EVER FLASH YOUR BIOS WITH THE WRONG ONE!