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How do I put a wait state in an Award BIOS?

Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 4:46 pm
by duchesz
I put a BioStar M6VLR motherboard in a box with a 1.1 GHz chip. It has an Award BIOS. I'd always been able to run a DOS based program (medical application) on the prior board which also ran this chip without any problems. Now I get a "divide overflow" error message everytime I try to run the program. I'm told this indicates the board is running too fast for the program and I have to put a "wait state" or two in the BIOS.

How do I do this? Is that done using the bank interleave or DRAM clock function?

Thanks

Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 5:56 pm
by NickS
What was the fastest machine it ran on successfully ? I don't think patching the BIOS will help.
Take a look at http://www.serviceuk.com/q005.html - the "slowdown" utility may help you
(or http://www.geocities.com/disk_operative ... odn200.zip - Slowdown 200).
Another thought - turn off cache (both internal and external) in the BIOS.

Posted: Wed May 14, 2003 1:32 am
by duchesz
Thanks.......Here's the sad story.....

My client sent me his machine (he's in Puerto Rico, I'm in California) and when I'd "tweaked" it to run the software perfectly, I sent it back. As the delivery guy walked up to my client's office, he dropped the box! The result was a badly damaged motherboard. Soooooooooo, he had the same motherboard put in with the same speed CPU chip but.......now he gets this "divide overflow error" message.

Obviously he's afraid to send the box to me again so I'm trying to find the answer and get him up and running again.

I'll test the "Slowdown" program....the second site wasn't accessible.

Thanks for the great idea!
Me[/i]

Posted: Wed May 14, 2003 2:12 pm
by NickS
Another thought - turn off cache (both internal and external) in the BIOS.
This can have quite an effect as well :wink: