Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Asus is my favorite motherboard to use for build your own computers. Tech support has generally been pretty good, but once in a while…

When the P5LD2 Deluxe board came out, it “supported” the Pentium “D” processor at 3.0Ghz, but not with the BIOS that shipped with it. The machine wouldn’t even POST. So how do you upgrade a BIOS in a PC that won’t boot up?

One way is to call Asus BIOS department and give them $5 for a new BIOS. That worked a couple of times, then they started sending me BIOS’s that didn’t work. I don’t know if they were defective or just had old code in them, and when I called they would send me another. But twice I went through about 4 of these before I got a good one. Eventually the boards started shipping with the right BIOS.

Another way is to throw away money on a lower grade processor (that I wouldn’t want otherwise) that the old BIOS does support, boot the machine, upgrade the BIOS, then change processors. I’m too cheap to spend $200 or so for a BIOS upgrade only processor.

The third way is to have 1 machine that does boot, extract the BIOS while the machine is running (carefully!) and put in the BIOS that won’t work (carefully!) and upgrade it. Unfortunately, Asus put a chassis fan connector right up against the BIOS socket which makes it tough to get the proper tool on it.

This problem essentially resolved itself a year or year and a half ago. But I had to RMA a P5LD2 Deluxe a couple of weeks ago, and when I got the board back and it wouldn’t boot. If I took the memory out, I got the memory missing beeps, but it would not POST all assembled.

I called tech support and mentioned this old BIOS problem and was assured that since I got the missing memory beeps, that couldn’t be it. Probably bad memory. Wrong, works in another PC, etc.

Well the board is grounding on the case, take it out. Nope, I’m not gonna fall for that.

So I (carefully) grabbed a working BIOS, popped it the RMA board and viola (sp), it worked!

So I performed the “hot bios upgrade” mentioned above, and with the loss of only about 2 - 3 hours of time (argh!) it’s all working.

I had a Pentium 4 2.4 processor floating around that would only eBay for about $25. So I decided to see how little I could spend to turn it into a decent computer.

I found the Asus P4V8X-MX motherboard was feature packed and very inexpensive. 1 GB of memory from Crucial.com was less than $75. The SATA hard drive I had laying around had XP installed on it from an Asus P5B or P5L installation, not sure which, but surprised the heck out of me when it booted into windows with just a few drivers missing.

Since more and more of the problems I solve are regarding Windows Vista, I decided to see how Vista would fare on this board.

So I downloaded and ran the Windows Upgrade Advisor. After doing its thing, the advisor reported that it had encountered an error (thanks for all of that detail, Microsoft); and perhaps I should re-download the latest version (did it change in 15 minutes?) and try again.

Forget it. Install Vista anyway.

I booted with the Windows Vista Ultimate DVD (Dell OEM copy) and chose to install to a new partition. Wisely, I had only allocated about half of the 120GB disk to the Windows XP Pro installation.

With Vista, there really aren’t too many questions to answer during the install so I came back later to see how it was doing. I had to press the power button since it had gone to sleep waiting for me (fitting, as I have fallen asleep so many times waiting for Windows) but essentially it was all done.

The Asus P4V8X-MX board did not come with Vista drivers and I didn’t download any. Yet everything worked; no yellow exclamations in device manager; NIC, sound, and an old Asus GeForce MX 400 AGP video card all worked perfectly. The P4V8X-MX has video on the board making it a great value, but I figured AGP video with its own RAM would perform better - and the card was just gathering dust anyway.

So I guess my advice when Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor reports an error is to just go ahead anyway.

With one BIG caveat!:

I had backed up the PC first, even though I didn’t care about the XP install, with Acronis True Image software to a USB hard drive.

When I was done I now had a dual boot, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Ultimate, computer. Runs great on both.