When Old Technology Won’t Die

In fact, even the CD-ROM is for me, a bit too nineties. Just the other day I was faced with having to install ‘The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay’ from five CD-ROMs. Using multiple discs means that it inevitably takes ages to install a program and not because you have to physically swap discs. After you put the first disc in, you start to do something else, and then you don’t notice when it’s time to swap discs. You then put in the second disc, but then forget to click ‘Ok’, resulting in it again sitting there doing nothing for ages. By the time, I’d got through all five discs, most of the evening had gone.

Now admittedly you can get at least get that game on DVD-ROM, but many big titles, such as Doom 3, aren’t available on DVD-ROM at all. The argument that publishers make is that many people still don’t have DVD drives in their machine. This seems unlikely to me, as any machine that doesn’t have a DVD drive is unlikely to have a graphics card fast enough to play the latest games anyway. So if you haven’t upgraded - move on people!

But it’s not just floppy discs and games on CD-ROM that get my goat. Take VHS cassette tapes. No really, just take them – far, far, away.

Now that DVD is here there can be no arguing that the quality of VHS is terrible. But too many people are reluctant to move on and give them up for the likes of DVD and hard disk recorders.

Just recently, I had a conversation with someone who explained that his Dad wanted to get one of those excruciating combined DVD and VHS recorder machines. The reason? Apparently, he had a film library of about a thousand and he didn’t want to throw them out.

The response that immediately went through my head was, “Oh my god! Why would you want to watch even one movie on VHS, let alone a thousand? Face it, VHS is just awful. For Pete’s sake, don’t you know that it’s only got 240 lines of resolution, not to mention the quality degradation every time you play the things? Just throw the buggers out and get them all again on DVD. And it’s got rubbish sound as well.”

Of course, what I actually said was, “well, that sounds very practical. I hear they’re quite affordable these days.”

But back to my upgrading scenario. Once I’d realised that I couldn’t easily format a USB key as a start-up disk, I turned to Google, where I discovered that though Microsoft hasn’t given any thought to booting from a USB key, HP has, and has a utility you can download. It's apparently only compatible with devices based on Disk-on key technology, which refers to any USB key manufactured by M-Systems, as opposed to those based on SanDisk technology, though I can’t confirm this.

The utility enables you to format your USB key to make it bootable. You still need to manually point the utility at boot files but these were also obtainable from a link on this page.

I then put the new BIOS file on the USB key and rebooted. It didn’t actually work first time of course, as I had the BIOS set to boot off a USB-FDD (Floppy Disk Drive) and, as it turned out, it needed to be set as a USB-HDD (Hard Disk Drive). However, it still wasn’t as simple as that. Even then, I discovered that the Gigabyte BIOS had yet another option to set the boot priority for hard disks, so I had to go into that and put the USB key at the top of the queue.

So, after a long, tortuous battle with Windows, and with the BIOS, I was finally able to boot from the USB-key.

Hallelujah!

The moral of this tale is that it’s clearly time for the PC industry to get together and sort this out. Microsoft needs to update Windows XP so that it’s quick and easy to create a boot USB key. BIOS manufacturers need to get together and standardise booting from a USB-key. This will also enable Microsoft to update the Windows install routine so that you don’t need a floppy. Alternatively motherboard manufactures can circumnavigate the problem entirely by making Windows-based BIOS flashing completely standard.

No doubt if you’ve got this far, you’re of course wondering if the updated BIOS made the graphics card work in my motherboard. Well, with the new BIOS safely installed, I put the card back in, booted the machine and got… nothing.

Sigh….