Comments on: Bios Bleg

By: David Rubie

David Rubie — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:17:09 +0000

Then the next time I boot up the computer the original dialogue box appears. And Im back to square one. Just to fit the mood, I tried to load an image of the dialogue box I see initially, but it wouldnt work.

Try un-installing the Asus software or if that doesn’t work, just disable the services that the Asus software tries to use. I’d try contacting Asus directly with the problem though, they might have a quick fix for it and their support is usually pretty good.

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:26:00 +0000

Oh yes, Vista is an utter dog. And attempts by laptop manufacturers to customise it for their brand generally make it even worse.

It’s worth paying for a copy of XP while you still can. After M$ stops allowing its sale then I reckon people will be justified in simply pirating it.

But I reckon Ubuntu is better still – I’ve found it worth the (considerable) transition hassle at home, despite the fact that OpenOffice aint quite as good as Office (mainly because VBA is a brilliant scripting language and environment). The expensive but good alternative is to go for Macs (a Unix based OS) throughout.

By: Andrew Leigh

Andrew Leigh — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:36:03 +0000

I had a somewhat similar issue with a Dell XPS running Vista. It turned out that the first time I attempted to update the Bios, it only half-completed. Every subsequent attempt failed until I got on the phone with a very good Dell tech (alas, you have to spend time with the less knowledgeable ones first), who got me to change some settings to tell the Dell that the Bios had not in fact been updated.

By: conrad

conrad — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:17:02 +0000

You are more than likely to have problems running Office 2003 on a Vista machine (I wish I still had an XP disc…) if you haven’t found out already. Here are some problems that you might encounter:
1) The graph program may not work on Word properly (the data sheet will often appear off the screen).
2) Outlook may not work at all
3) If you use large files on Excel (e.g., 10Meg plus), the speed will drive you crazy. It can hang for minutes.

Other programs that won’t work at all that you might use:
1) Older Macromedia products (like Fireworks 2.0).

Things that will cause problems:
2) Any development environments that create lots of files (i.e., thousands — there is a hot fix for this, but you need to email Microsoft for it).