Those of us at Dinarius have long seen tablet shaped, touchscreen personal computers as the next step in what most users would prefer. Our darling was the Gateway M280. Despite the sense that tablets make, few folks bought in to it. The industry swallowed R&D on tablets and UMPC’s (another brilliant next step that went largely unadopted) and instead found a public ga-ga for smart phones.
See Gizmodo’s YouTube sneak of Microsoft’s kick-ass Courier and see HP’s already realized tablet that left the gate long before Apple.
Vincent Cerf, the Godfather of the Internet, stated that online videos will move from streaming to being set up for download. What this does to advertising and sites like YouTUBE aren’t discussed here. What is advised is that new users and those thinking of purchasing new computers consider the Hard drive capacity to be more important than ever in coming years.
07.31.06 – After a computer is done beeping, one can hope that the monitor will show the user what the next problem in line is. With such complex circuitry in computers, the diagnostics that are built in become absolutely vital to repairing problems.
So as a chumpy, yet surprisingly popular Part 2, here it is…
BIOS Beeps [Broken Gift 1]
08.02.06 – NOTE: Do not download from the ads on the pages we link you to in this article. All links are the added content.
Squeaks and beeps, very irritating. At times, your computer should actually make some noise. A single beep on start up means that your computer has passed all its ‘Power-ON Self-Tests.’ Those are called POST. When a computer fails a test in POST, it might not be able to display the problem on the monitor, so it beeps.
It’s a very basic thing, but even seasoned tech can’t remember all the meanings of all the beeps. Beeps come from the Motherboard of the computer and BIOS is the system responsible for the beeps. Since there are several different board makers, there are several things that, for example, three short beeps could mean. We’ve gotten computers before that have failed their POST tests but all we hear from clients is akin to, “nothing is on the monitor.”
More helpful to your friendly neighborhood technician is the information about the beeps that you hear. Do you hear one long and two short beeps? Did you hear four short beeps? One case in the repair shop was a constant, single long beep that continued until we pulled the plug. Now let’s learn what that means: Repeating single long beep; board maker – SIS 530 chipset with Socket 7; computer maker – generic Brand X made by her brother years and years ago.
A visit to Google searching SIS 530 Socket 7 reveals 191,000 sites. The first couple tell us this may be an Athlon supporting PCChips motherboard. And this turns out to be wrong. There are two models that look as if they were fairly advanced in their time that support Pentium processors. PCChips’s website, PCChipsUSA.com and their BIOS (Award/AMI) support area is here.
Thankfully, both board models are running AMIBIOS which means that the beep code will be the same no matter which board we’re really looking at. An ‘AMIBIOS beep code’ search brings two pages from BiosCentral with one containing our description here. Another Award/AMI BIOSreference online for discerning which damn board you actually have. Wikipedia delivers impressive little-known stats for American Megatrends, or AMI. As stated in the AMI board site, Phoenix BIOS is often, erroneously lumped with AMIBIOS.
Even before playing detective, we knew what the problem was. Did you figure out what the BIOS was beeping about? After addressing this issue, we were bummed out to discover that the integrated video was, in fact, busted. So what do you know? There will be a part two…
