Bug of the Month

Look Out for that Slipstream Fix!

Intense competition and the rapid pace of development in the PC industry create problems for corporate IS managers trying to establish some degree of consistency throughout their PC inventory. Systems purchased from one vendor delivered months -- or even weeks -- apart might contain different motherboard and BIOS revisions and several brands of hard drives and video cards.

Such inconsistencies turn system upgrades, connectivity, and user-support issues into a management nightmare. And now it seems the beleaguered IS manager can't even count on consistency between identical PCs purchased at the same time. One IS manager at a mid-size company, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity, reported receiving t wo new PC servers from a major PC vendor, only to discover that just one of the two a pparently identical machines would run Windows NT. The other repeatedly locked up.

Both machines were clearly marked with identical motherboard and BIOS revisions and subsystem components. Several days of troubleshooting by phone, plus a visit from a manufacturer representative, failed to resolve the problem.

In the end, the mystery was solved when the IS manager switched system BIOS chips. The manufacturer later confirmed that undocumented BIOS changes had rendered the system unusable with Windows NT.

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