Okay, today I turned BIOS shadowing on and left the Video ShadowingOK, but the real question I had wasn't clearly answered, which was did
off.
And yes, I got 2 more BIOS upgrades and tried them out. With Video
Shadowing on, they made no difference. I still had an unstable
Mandrake system. So I went back to the 1998 version of the Award
BIOS that came with my motherboard. I won't be changing BIOSes for
this test.
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you have system instabilities with the system shadowing only? And why
in the world would you want to run an older bios on your motherboard if
a newer one is available?
You're right, I wasn't clear in my post.
BIOS Shadowing had always been turned off. Only Video Shadowing was turned on. I'm now running with Video Shadowing off and BIOS Shadowing on. And yes, I've noticed an improvement in program performance with BIOS Shadowing on. There's 128MB of RAM on this box.
As to why I didn't stay with an updated BIOS... There was a warning in my documentation about upgrading the BIOS that said something to the effect, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." The exact reason said that while the updated BIOS may fix a few known problems, it might also introduce a few unknown problems. Oh, and it is an Award BIOS. Well, if ASUS and AWARD weren't absolutely positive about the BIOS upgrades, I didn't see any reason to add more uncertainty as to what was causing the Mandrake system instability. So I went back to the original BIOS version.
The original BIOS was Version 1002, released around spring1998. Version 1011 was released around fall 1999. And Version 1012 was the last version released spring 2000. (Don't hold me to these exact dates, but I think I'm fairly close.) There wasn't much difference in the BIOS options between the 3 versions. Version 1012 offered some type of hard disk failure monitoring, which some people told me was marketing hype and others told me it was worth it and worth the performance drop.
So during those 4 months I tried all 3 versions of the BIOS, and suffered the same problems. Once again, Video Shadowing was on and BIOS shadowing was off.
In a perverse sort of way, I like hearing that the problem may have been the Matrox G100 AGP card and Video Shadowing. The G100 was the start of Matrox's AGP line, and could have been the victum of an early bug. The G400 card seems to be very stable.
Regards, The Other
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