Frank said:
My friend's Dell Inspiron PC has failed. I think its BIOS was being
"upgraded" when something went wrong. Anyway, it's u/s.
One of the options we are considering is replacing the motherboard,
possibly with a refurbished one. I have little experience of carrying
out such a replacement. What are the non-obvious pitfalls (I hope the
others are covered)? In particular, will the windows OS (XP) have to be
re-activated and if so is it a straightforward process?
Any advice gratefully received
Frank
Check to see if the BIOS EEPROM is socketed.
You can go here, and order a BIOS chip programmed with the
version of BIOS you want. This is an example of a company
providing the service. At one time, you could find a company
like this on each continent, reducing shipping time.
http://www.badflash.com/removbio.htm
Badflash would need an undamaged BIOS file, in a format
they could use. Some "flasher packages" you download for
computers, go to some trouble to make it difficult to
get the file. If you extract the file successfully, it
should be a "power-of-two" size, and it should also
match the claimed storage size of the actual flash BIOS chip.
At least one unzipping tool, does "too much unzipping", and
the BIOS file isn't usable.
If the BIOS chip is socketed, you can stick a working Dell
BIOS in there, instead of the bricked mess currently present.
This is an example of a socketed replaceable BIOS.
http://www.badflash.com/images/new_IO_bios.jpg
Here, they soldered the BIOS to the motherboard. Some
soldering iron work would be needed to put a new badflash.com
chip in its place. When I've done chips like this, with
my crude home tools, I used a miniature $100 pair of
cutters, to cut the legs off and make replacement easier.
Sometimes the solder sucker just doesn't do a clean
enough job for easy removal.
http://www.badflash.com/images/plcc.jpg
*******
The latest motherboards use an 8 pin (serial interface)
EEPROM. Some motherboards solder those in place. Eventually,
a few manufacturers realized, from the amount of tech support
calls they were getting, that the damn thing should be socketed.
If you have one of those, hope there's a socket in place.
(This is just to show what an 8 pin DIP BIOS would look like.
It's the same format of package as one of these.)
http://www.twistywristarcade.com/645-278-thickbox/93c56-eeprom.jpg
Getting an 8 pin EEPROM re-programmed, may be more of a chore
than one of the older formats. Just because the sites that
program these things, don't have an adapter for it.
I've seen a reprogrammer for 8 pin format, offered a number
of years ago, and they wanted $150 USD for it. Which is a bit
too much for a casual, single device fixup. If you're in the
computer repair business, the $150 fee would be worth it.
Paul