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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc.

DELL 128.58

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9:43 AM EST

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To: Annette who wrote (86179)	12/20/1998 11:53:00 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) of 176387

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE PCs WERE MISSING A BIOS CHIP. I suspect that your brother heard the story wrong. I won't dispute that maybe something happened for which the bank hired consultants. Let me speculate based on what I know about computers and their manufacturing methods but I want to emphasise I have no knowledge of this event. The bios in a PC class computer has not been housed in a separate chip for several years (I think the changeover was about 5 years ago). There is an integrated chipset which contains all sorts of the glue logic, including the serial and i/o ports, timers, the CMOS and the flash memory. It is this flash memory where the bios is stored. That chip cannot be removed from a board without unsoldering the traces. It not only would not boot, it could not pass electrical tests as there would be what amounts to a big hole in the board. To speculate on what may have happened, Microsoft released Windows98 a few months ago. There have been reports that there were installation problems. These may well have been fixed with bios change. It is possible that a shippment of machines could have the older bios revision and still work for the most part, only being noticed after delivery. In such a case to upgrade to the new bios a diskette needs to be made containing the bios and a small program to flash it into the motherboard. It takes only a minute or so, but with 7000 machines they would want consistent and central control over the operation, hence the consultants. The whole operation would be more complicated if the machines were a variety that did not have diskette drives (a common request for institutions which work with sensitive data). In this case the consultants would probably hook up a diskette drive on a temporary basis to upgrade the bios. Such an operation would involve opening the box which again would be left up to field service personel. TP (Who wants to repeat, I don't know what happened but have layed out a plausable scenario that is consistant with what your brother told you).

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