January 21, 2003
Like molasses on a cold morning
As a perused dc.forsale-computers the other day I ran across an ad for some cheap P2/333 processors. I've an old Dell 2200 that's been running on a single P2/233 for ages but it could support two up to 333mHz. Now this is no speed demon by todays standards but it's here, running and doing fine with RedHat linux.
What I discover is it's BIOS is just waaay too old to support the new speed.
The nice thing about Dell's is their service tag number. It even comes up in the setup BIOS. Armed with that number I visited the Dell support site and quickly found new BIOS software for it.
Now the sloooow part, dealing with floppies. Man alive are these things slow! It's been so long since I wrote anything to a floppy I forgot how bad it is. Chunk, chunk, chunk, grind, grind, grind... and that's just to write the BIOS boot floppy. Booting from it, on the other hand, is a whole other experience in sitting on your thumbs.
Finally after several tries it dawns on me, the floppy drive is bad! Go figure. I guess sitting there unused for all that time must've rusted it up or something. So now it's off to boot into linux, write the BIOS file to the FAT partition that I so conveniently left DOS installed on. Whenever you set up a PC don't forget to partition a small (500mb) chunk of the drive for DOS. It's pretty handy, even today, for getting stuff like BIOS and card flash ROMs updated.
Anyway, those flaming hoops jumped through I finally got it update. Ta da! It now sees the processors at the right speed.
Now off to fiddle with grub and kernel changes...
