Increasing occurrence of platform problems (was: slow last 128MB of RAM in a 2GB system?)

[Ben Scott]

On 4/13/07, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> aside: Is it just more or is this on the uptick? - I'm seeing 'buggy
> BIOS' as the cause of so many problems recently.  I've been through
> nasty problems with nVidia, ATI, and SiS BIOS bugs, all in the past
> year, where I haven't worried much about it previously.

  People are asking the IBM pee cee to be a Real Computer more than
ever these days.  The limitations of the circa 1982 BIOS are really
starting to poke though in places, and the edges are quite sharp.
Device discovery?  Hardware monitoring?  Power management?
Virtualization?  The original BIOS provided text and disk services
which were barely adequate.  Oh, and a BASIC interpreter in ROM.
Things have changed a little.  :)

  Improvements are attempted, but there is no central authority.
Everything is decided by de facto standard and industry consortium,
and is then implemented by the lowest bidder, who usually substitutes
"does it boot MS Windows and run Minesweeper without crashing in the
first ten minutes?" for actually reading the spec.

  If you don't want that, buy a single-company solution, a la Sun, HP,
or Apple.  They'll guarantee everything works, because they control
everything.  You'll pay a higher purchase cost, and generally have
less freedom.  There's a direct correlation.

  As Tom Jefferson said, "The price of freedom is eternal hardware
issues", or something like that.  ;-)

-- Ben