Using PC HW

[Krister Wikstrom]

A little warning about using normal consumer PC HW - it seems, that most of the late motherboards are very
optimized for speed. One manufacturer don't like to be slower than the others. All timings are on the limit, 
and it doesn't require very much changes in the environment (humidity,temperature and interference) to go over.

Late motherboards also contain chipsets with tons of registers to set before it works - don't think it's
easy to replace the BIOS with your own code. There are detailed manuals about the chipsets, so it could be
done, but reserve some time...

About making boot faster, some BIOSes have configuration options to skip some tests, like detailed memory test
during startup.

One other problem could also happen with some motherboards - I'm not sure if it is possible to disable the keyboard
on all boards. If you don't have the keyboard connected, you might end up with BIOS saying "keyboard error, press
F1 to continue" etc. (very stupid message anyway).


   Krister Wikstrom
   kwi at mamma.icl.fi