BIOS Outdated?

[ccronan]

I have a 400MHz/PII mongrel which I bought a year ago with Win98. Never worked well and I regretted 98. I upgraded to Win98 SE and purchased the CD from MS to do it figuring that it would provide upgrades of most of my drivers, etc. It crashed/froze way too frequently. I had to uninstall many programs. I worked for a month with MS (there was 90 day free tech help) but they were unable to solve my problems. The tech's conclusion was that I was sold a motherboard with an out-of-date BIOS. The board is an out of US contruction and AMI will not support it. The Version is 9.25 and dated 07/15/95. When it boots up I see another date at the upper left corner 9/25/98, about one week before I picked it up.

Is Microsoft correct in their opinion that my problem is due to an old BIOS?

The PC is still under warrantee but the seller seems reluctant to do anything about it. The motherboard mfgr, PCChips does have an incredibly slow web site with updated BIOS versions that can be flashed into a new chip. I am not able to do that but I did download the latest file.

What now, especially if the vendor refuses to accept responsibility?

[Nathan]

What problems, exactly, are you having? The more info we can get, the better we can help.

[ccronan]

One problem is that if Outlook Express is chosen as the primary Email, I can not access Eudora, my preferred Email - system will freeze. IE (4 since I had to uninstall SE) freezes frequently, too. Rebooting is my only solution.

I can not run any Norton AV or even their system Works (I know there are evils associated with that package) but I have no AV protection right now. Many other new programs will freeze my PC.

MicroSoft gave up on me. That 1995 BIOS date is definitely suspicious and may be the problem - it predates any thought of Win98.

The Eudora problem is my test for modifications.

Chuck

[Alzarius]

The 1995 date is not what you think it is. My chip also has that same date. To my knowledge, it is the date the chips were manufactured or some such. The ONLY date that you need to be interested in the the 9/98 date that you also mentioned. THAT is the date of the bios revision. Did you set the settings on your computer or did the person you bought it from? I'd gather that there are some conflicts either in the bios or settings on the motherboard. Is your proessor overclocked? If you don't think it is, you should check it anyway. Sometimes sellers will overclock a processor and say you are buying a 500mhz when it's really a 300 or 400 mhz chip. Sometimes you can even get a remarked chip. Those are the worst as they have been overclocked, but you can't easily tell with the numbers on the chip sonce it's been remarked. Check this though. Overclocked chips can cause lots of errors. You could have other problems as well. Somewhat faulty memory chips or even memory chips that have been "sped up" in the bios by changing the timing which can be bad on chips that ca't handle the speed. Anyway, check some of this stuff out. My PcChips board is just great and doesn't give me any errors.

[BBA]

Well, I can say from experience that most problems with 98 and 98SE are either APM related or hardware failure. The only expected problems are shutdown freezes and reboots. Those are the hardware compatibility issues.

Program crashes are usually from hardware failure...IE: bad ram or CPU not feeling too good. Don't look into OS for the fix, since you've tried so much software that is known to work on almost anything.

DO you have any RAM to swap out? You could even have a bad motherboard, as PCCHIPS used typically the cheapest components available and that often leads to premature failure of boards (and yours is pretty old) Cheap capacitors tend to dry out over time, thermal expansion of parts can cause problems also, all of this stuff can induce strange problems over time.

[ccronan]

Alzarius,

The 9/25/98 date does not correspond to any historical version dates on the PCChips web site History for my M729 board. That's one reason I was confused by that date. The most recent BIOS upgrade is dated Feb 24, 1999.

Chuck Cronan