Technical Problems
On November 13, 1993, a number of PCs that used the AMIBIOS firmware started at boot-up to play the tune to Happy Birthday repeatdly while halting the computer until a key was pressed. The problem was resolved with a Trojan-free firmware upgrade from most manufacturers.
The AMI WinBIOS was a 1994 update to AMIBIOS, with a graphical user interface setup screen that mimicked the appearance of Windows 3.1 and supported mouse navigation,unusual at the time. WinBIOS was viewed favourably by Anand Lal Shimpi at AnandTech, but described by Thomas Pabst at Tom's Hardware as a "big disappointment", in part because of problems with distributing IRQ signals to every PCI and ISA expansion slot.
In July 2008 Linux developers discovered issues with ACPI tables on certain AMIBIOS BIOSes supplied by Foxconn, ASUS, and MSI. The problem is related to the ACPI _OSI method, which is used by ACPI to determine the OS version (in case an ACPI patch only applies to one specific OS). In some cases, the OSI method caused problems on Linux systems, skipping code that was only executed on Windows systems. Foxconn and AMI worked together to develop a solution, which was included in later revisions of AMIBIOS. The issue affected motherboards with Intel Socket 775. Actual system behavior differed based on BIOS version, system hardware and Linux distribution.
Read more about this topic: American Megatrends
Famous quotes containing the words technical and/or problems:
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
“The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)