How to access Bios on a compaq presario

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

Greetings, My officemate claims he cannot enter the bios on his compaq presario. The machine is 1.5 to 2 years old.. What are the keystrokes?
Thanks very much...

[edwin]

F1 or F10 when you hear the double beep on startup.

If its only 1.5 to 2 years old I doubt the speaker is functional.

On startup when the Compaq splash screen comes up, you will see a blinking white cursor in the upper right hand corner. When you see that blinking cursor press the F10 key repeatedly.

I've searched through pages of forum posting and haven't had much luck. I'm trying to install Linux on an old Presaio 5528 (a combined computer & monitor with a whopping 24MB of RAM!!). I want to boot from CD to do the install. I get no splash screen and have tried the F1, F10, INS, Alt + F1/F10 to access the BIOS. Sometimes I get a keyboard error, but no BIOS screen. I followed links from the forum to the HP help site, and found no useful help. Is it true the BIOS settings are stored on the hard drive, so if I reformat it I'll lose the settings? Thanks in advance for any help.

[soupy]

QLeap wrote:

I've searched through pages of forum posting and haven't had much luck. I'm trying to install Linux on an old Presaio 5528 (a combined computer & monitor with a whopping 24MB of RAM!!). I want to boot from CD to do the install. I get no splash screen and have tried the F1, F10, INS, Alt + F1/F10 to access the BIOS. Sometimes I get a keyboard error, but no BIOS screen. I followed links from the forum to the HP help site, and found no useful help. Is it true the BIOS settings are stored on the hard drive, so if I reformat it I'll lose the settings? Thanks in advance for any help.

That's the way some were done, though I can't say for sure they did that with the 5528. You can check for yourself here:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/prod ... g=en&cc=ca