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Incorrect System information

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yorkshirepudding

IS-IT--Management
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Hi Folks i have a laptop which i clean installed windows XP to as the computer literrally died and Time's rescue disks are rubbish, but any way i detract.

after this upgrade information on the computer processor speed, ram and hard disk space is innacurate. i am correct in thinking i need to upgrade the bios? and is this hard on a laptop?

the BIOS is from Phoenix and i have had a good look around the configuration screen but can find anyway to set it manually

Thanks!
 
I dont think that XP will change this,
if you computer died its more likly the BIOS settings were defaulted.

if you know what your doing, default the BIOS settings and go through them one at a time for your config
 
Ill certainly have a try at that!

im not so concerned by it to be honest the install was done in january and ive had no problems since, its just run a little slow but it was a 500AMD and 128MB laptop, yesterday i installed some new RAM so i wanted to make sure it was getting the full use of it
 
You can go to the laptop mfgrs website and download the latest bios for your machine. First check to see which bios you already have. And also download the bios flash program for phoenix. I think Award bought out Phoenix but you may still find the phoenix bios flasher there. Also download the instructions.

They do warn you not to flash unless you really need to.
Another thing you could do is google a free version of progs like aida, everest, etc, these all show you what hardware you have running and should identify all your hardware just to make sure. It doesnt replace the fact that the bios doesnt recognize them, its just another tool. I would look for everest first.


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yorkshirepudding
Remember that laptops mostly have integrated graphics so use system memory for the display.
This means the system often is 16/32 or even 64 MB short of what is actually installed.

As for CPU speed: well that could be the bios reverting back to default front side bus so appears as a slower CPU.

Hard drive space, thats strange, maybe there is a hidden partitian with the old recovery on it? or is it that you are expecting the hard drive to report it's full capacity when because of the way they market sizes, formatted drives are always reported proportionaly less.

Please post more info.
Martin




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i did have to format the drive completly so if thats causing incorrect drive size information i can live with it

to be honest the numbers are not far out anyway i was worried that it would cause a bigger problem!
 
Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management. See what it shows for partitions and sizes.
 
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