HP Vectra VL 5/xxx 5 manual Little Ben, Other PCI and ISA Accessory Devices Under Plug and Play

2 System Board

Devices on the ISA Bus

Updating the BIOS Before Considering Replacing the System Board

If the computer is faulty, but it starts up correctly, and the fault is not clearly due to the system board hardware, then it is advisable to check the BIOS version number. The BIOS version number can be found from the summary

screen, or the Setup program, obtained by pressing or , respectively, when the computer has just been restarted, as described in Chapter 4.

If it is not the current version of the BIOS, the System ROM should be flashed with the new version, as described on the previous page. The computer should then be re-run to see if this has cleared the problem.

Little Ben

Little Ben is an HP application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), designed to be a companion to the Super I/O chip. It is described on page 73.

Other PCI and ISA Accessory Devices Under Plug and Play

Plug and Play is an industry standard for automatically configuring the computer’s hardware. When you start the computer, the Plug and Play system BIOS can detect automatically which hardware resources (IRQs, DMAs, memory ranges, and I/O addresses) are used by the system-based components.

All PCI accessory boards are Plug and Play, although not all ISA boards are. Check the accessory board’s documentation if you are unsure.

The computer is PCI 2.1 compliant, and PnP 1.1 compliant. This meets the “Windows 95 Required” level for Plug and Play. Accessory boards which are Plug and Play are automatically configured by the operating system (Windows 95) or by the BIOS (other operating systems).

In general, in a Plug and Play configuration, resources for an ISA board have to be reserved first (using a utility under Windows 95 or ICU for DOS/ Windows) and then you can plug in your board. If you want to install an ISA board when running a non Plug-and-Play operating system, such as Windows for Workgroups, you have to reserve the resources for the board using the ICU (for Windows). Failure to do so may lead to resource conflicts.

The procedure for installing an ISA accessory board that is not Plug and Play in Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 is described in the User’s Guide that is supplied with the computer.

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