🚀 go-pugleaf

David Oliver (doliver@ozemail.com.au) wrote:
: I have just read your tales of woe with regaed to installing os2.  It 
: didn't mean much to me untill you mentioned that the BIOS was an AWARD 
: BIOS.  I bought a P90 with AWARD BIOS toward the beginning of the year 
: and found a large number of compatibity problems.  I took it back to my 
: suppier and got it exchanged for a good American made board with AMI 
: BIOS.  Since then the number of problems I hear about with AWARD BIOS's 
: is getting greater.

*SIGH*  Time for another posting on this subject, I guess....

1) You changed the BIOS, chipset, motherboard manufacturer, and various
   and sundry other things, and ANY of these could have caused the
   problems you had.  In fact, I'd argue that the chipset is a more
   likely culprit than the BIOS, at least for generic sorts of problems
   under a multitasking, protected-mode OS like OS/2, which doesn't
   even use the BIOS for much once it's booted.
2) There is not such thing as "the" Award BIOS, or even "the" Award BIOS
   version 4.50G (the most commonly-cited "version" of "the" Award BIOS
   at the moment).  Every manufacturer which licenses a BIOS from Award
   makes various major and minor modifications to the BIOS for a variety
   of reasons, and yet the version number of 4.50G stays the same.  Some
   manufacturers have multiple revisions of "the" 4.50G Award BIOS.  Thus,
   a problem which is tracked to the BIOS on one particular machine using
   "the" Award BIOS may not exist on another machine with "the same" BIOS,
   because the BIOS is NOT the same.  Even an earlier or later revision of
   the same model motherboard may not exhibit the problem because the
   manufacturer may have revised the BIOS.
3) You may have noticed lots of posts about problems with "the" Award BIOS
   for a number of reasons:
   a) It's a popular BIOS at the moment, and so can easily wind up in
      machines with other problems.
   b) You've been sensitized to it by your bad experience with a machine
      having that BIOS.
   c) These types of posts tend to feed on themselves, drawing comments
      relaying similar (or dissimilar) experiences.

I certainly can't deny the possibility that the original poster's 
problems are related to his BIOS, but I feel compelled to point out that 
picking on the BIOS is frequently unjustified, or at least insufficiently 
justified.  FWIW, I've got a motherboard with a variety of Award 4.50G 
BIOS [it's an Asus PCI-486SP3G], and I have no BIOS-related problems with 
it.  I've seen other posts from others with the same (and other) 
motherboards with Award BIOSes that have no problems.  I therefore 
conclude that problems in machines that use Award BIOSes:

1) May be due to problems in the motherboard or other components unrelated
   to the BIOS;
2) May be due to problems in specific revisions of the BIOS introduced by
   the problem board's manufacturer, or in the original code and not fixed
   by some manufacturers but fixed by others;
3) May be due to a combination of 1 & 2 -- a bug in the BIOS which interacts
   with a hardware design.

--
					--Rod Smith
					  RSMITH@PSYCH.COLORADO.EDU