it…out

Our home desktop machine, Kaga, was turning into total crap. Something had to be done…

Kaga had a tendency to lock up…a lot. I eventually looked into the system log and found out that ACPI was causing all sorts of problems that “might lead to system instability.” Not only did it lead the system to instability, it helped it find shelter and a job with a decent wage once it got there. It locked up at least once a day, which was a problem since it was also serving our printer.

The system log said that ACPI was trying to write to BIOS-related memory. Actually, the log just had a big hex number that I looked up at microsoft.com that told me what I really wanted to know. I went off to FIC’s website and downloaded all the necessary BIOS updates. I couldn’t tell if they were incremental or not, so I downloaded each one that was newer than ours. Next, I needed to make a boot disk to perform the flash. I had to tear the house apart looking for a floppy before I turned up my Wing Commander IV DOS boot disk, which used to make a startup disk from XP. When I booted, it just said “Starting…”. I wondered which OS it had put on the disk it made, so I typed VER and got this back:

Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition 4.9

Nice…

I applied the flash (all 4 of them), and they failed. It turns out I needed to turn off Bios Guard or something like that. After entering Bios setup, I found the correct setting and turned it off. Oh, and I also noticed that DMA was disabled.

Yeah.

No DMA on any drives.

Welcome to 1991.

How long had this been disabled? I have no idea, but I turned it back on, and now the system is noticeably faster and no longer crashes. The system log is clean and lockups are no more.

As a side note, one of the ACPI-related lockups occurred while I was installing DX9. This caused the Battlefield 1942 installer to tell me that the game required DX8.1 and that since I had DX6 I was fine. That raised a flag in my brain, but the installer continued…until another lockup occurred. So now I had half a BF1942 install, and a broken DX9 install.

There was no uninstall for BF1942, so I had to rake through the registry and filesystem and remove it myself, which worked. Next, I downloaded the non-net install of DX9 and ran that.

Disco.

Everything works…for now.