AMD nibbles at Intel business PC market share

"Pretty slim" but not completely negligible. And conceivably as markets developed for the kind of info a machine-specific serial number ID can provide, hackers would find it profitable to turn the number on. To induce a restart, or even to simply rely on the user to restart the machine at some point (most people restart their machine every day) after executing the BIOS commands required is a piece of cake for a half-way decent hacker, of course.

Your habit of changing chips frequently nullifies the problem, naturally, but I think you fall into a rather small minority of computer users.

The prob is not the restart but changing the bios. Yes a hack can restart, but a bios change? WOW!

If it's a one year-old Asus with Raid it would be an A7V133 or 133A (which supports 266 Mhz front side bus). That's the board I have.

First thing you should do is check your event log in Win2K. This board is notorious for disk write errors being reported under WIN2k when drives ae connected to the Raid ports. While I never suffered any data loss or corruption, I switched bak to the ATA 66 IDE channels. I was getting at least 3 reports of write errors every day.

I just downloaded the most recent bios for this board, and it implements support for the XP+ chips. The only thing is, the board doesn't support DDR memory. Under these conditions, you'll get nominal improvement with the XP+ over the 1 GHz Athlon, but nothing to write home about.

It also depends on whether you have a 1 GHz Athlon that supports the 266 MHz front side bus as there are two flavours of this chip. You can tell by looking at your bios. If the CPU frequency is set to 100, then you have an older chip. If it is set to 133, then you have the faster CPU. Either way, you will be able to eek more power out of your CPU. For example, my 1 GHz runs rock solid at 1.33 GHz (CPU clock multiplier set to 10, CPU frequency set to 133). At these settings my setup outperforms a P4 1.5 GHz system according to Sandra.

Reviews of the VIA 266 chipset, which is the most widely available chipst that supports DDR have been less than glowing. That's why I've stuck with what I have (like you, i usually upgrade the and mobo every 8 months). However, two companies, SIS and VIA, have released new chipsets that are supposedly screamers. Unfortunately, they are not widely available yet.

A good place to check is Anandtech Motherboard Reviews. They have a good run down on what is available. According to them, if you can find an Asus A7M266 (AMD 760 chipset) snap it up. Otherwise wait for the newer boards that are reviewed there.

The prob is not the restart but changing the bios. Yes a hack can restart, but a bios change? WOW!

BIOS can be hacked. Passwords can be a problem (BIOS password extractors are available), but it is doable. Anyway lots of people don't even use the password feature and if they have FLASH BIOS installed it's even easier.

Now I guess your objection is that it can't be done over a network, and to be honest I am not sure if FLASH BIOS can be hacked over a network, so you may be right. However, I think most hackers would say, if it's DOS, it's hackable.

Fair enough. I'm no hacker so this is way out of my realm. However, if you have the right tools on your computer you can pretty much keep out the hackers. :)

HUGE THANKS.

MUCH APPRECIATED. Will check those things out or ask tech friend who built the thing to do so. . . house mate also does some such.

Much appreciate the link.

I believe we have the latest bios downloaded. He had a dickens of a time getting it all to work well the last upgrade.

BLESSINGS TO YOU N YOUR DEAR ONES AND ALL YOUR CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS THIS CHRISTMAS/NEW YEAR'S SEASON.

Happy Holidays to you and your's quix.

You'll find that Anandtech site a great hardware resource. I find it more readable than Tom's. And, their forums are quite good too. You might also want to check out the storage section. They had a good article on raid.

MUCH THANKS.

YOU CAN TAKE COMFORT in the fact that you've helped tons of FREEPERS by evidence of the fact that your ref'd site is so busy I can't yet get into it.

I just hope that when I post my Linux server vanity over the weekend someone will come to my aid :)

Don't know that I can come to your aid technically but I sure can philosophically. I think MS is worse than a commie plot. They are known as ruthless by folk in the business over here. . . in the usual full meaning of the term. . .

I'd applaud more of BG's megabucks greed if he produced a better product and provided better services. I'm not real impressed with his charity giving. Doesn't hurt him at all and adds to his image.

But he will get his due. The Bible declares that TO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN, MUCH IS REQUIRED. I'd hate to be in BG's shoes on that score.

As to Linux, Am hoping to give it a try after I go to two CPU's hopefully sometime in the next 6 months. I'll likely give XP a try as well. Already have OFFICE XP. I gave up on MS service efforts. What a joke. And the cheeky cost of even email responses to help needs. . . Sheesh.

BG doesn't just want a cash cow or even a herd of cash cows--he wants all the milk giving animals on all the planets in all the galaxies in all the galactic clusters of all the n dimensions imaginable.

Talk about greed gone to seed. . . and then some to the nth degree. PRIDE GOES BEFORE A FALL, including his. . . though he's far less proud than Billdo and Shrillfanny.