The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69659   Message #1184316
Posted By: JohnInKansas
12-May-04 - 08:58 PM
Thread Name: Tech: Motherboard incompatabiliy with disks?
Subject: RE: Tech: Motherboard incompatabiliy with disks?
I haven't used many HP computers, and haven't owned one; but they seem to be one of those vendors where everything associated with a discontinued model simply disappears from their website. Usually you can dig up some info, but you almost have to have a specific model number to get into "legacy" machines.

The appearance, from what I did find, was that it's a "selection" of options and software that made one of their desktops into a "Brio." There seem to have been "Brio" versions of at least 3 Machine "lines."

All academic though, ... it does appear that many Brio versions used a BIOS that can't address more than 8 or 8.4 GB on a hard drive (the usable on a "10 GB" drive, depending on setup) and if you really have only a 90W power supply you may not be able to "spin" many disks of newer kinds, or add many extras that need power from the machine.

There seem to be a lot of "retailers" offering RAM upgrades for Brio, which probably indicates a lot of people found out they want more than the 64MB that came in the early ones. I'm not sure I'd trust some of the retail sources to get the right one for "my model" but a check with one of the memory makers should identify what you'd want if that looks helpful. At least some, probably later Brio offerings, came with WinXP, and 64MB is NOT enough to run WinXP except as a "cripple." In a "bare bones" machine like the Brio, you may find a BIOS limit on RAM size, but (IMO) 256 MB is about the minimum to make WinXP "useful." I run 1 GB.

The "white paper" linked previously indicates HP had no intention of issuing BIOS updates for any of the versions with low HD capability, but curiously, I saw one - apparently HP - paper on "How to Clear Brio BIOS, that wouldn't seem to be applicable unless you had a BIOS update to install. There may be an update available if you go direct to the motherboard maker, but you'll likely need specific info on your board and BIOS version to research it.

John