M$ alteration of MY hardware

[KRFinch at dstsystems.com]

Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me for a couple of reasons.

The first is anecdotal.  For some reason, when I'm running Win2k on my
ThinkPad and change the working screen from the built-in one to the
external port, Windows actually goes and changes the BIOS settings for this
rather than using the auto-detect functionality built into the video
controller.  This is especially maddening when I hibernate the unit in the
docking station (with an external monitor attached) and then try to wake it
up outside of the docking station.  The BIOS says to skip the autodetect,
and I will actually end up with the machine powered up with nothing on the
screen and no way to get an image either.  The only way to get it to work
when that happens is to pop the battery, reboot, and manually change the
bios.

The second reason it wouldn't surprise me is the way that Win2k handles IRQ
steering and reassignment.  With Win9x, you could manually set the IRQ's
and DMA's on some hardware, and the O/S would (sometimes) figure out what
you were doing and assign the remaining hardware with the remaining
resources.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if Win2k just took this all a
step further and simply dynamically reset the hardware to use the resources
it wanted.

I doubt it will cause any PERMANENT damage, but it might make setting up a
dual-boot far more difficult.  The best way to get around this, I would
imagine, is to use something really old that has jumpers to set the
configurations.  If it's hard-wired, I doubt Win2k can do much about it.

Best of luck!

Kevin Finch
Network Administrator
DST Systems, Inc.
816/435-6039
krfinch at dstsystems.com

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