Hi all, I have aquired an old PB Pentium Pro 150 that I am going to give to Mom for a surfing and E-mail machine. I cannot seem to enter the BIOS regardless of what key combo I try. I searched the WWW and found quite a few different key combos but none work. Also of note is on booting it shows keyboard not detected but yet it will beep if a key is held down and also works fine in DOS (no O/S installed yet).Are these two issues related? I Tried using the ultimate boot disk to detect the BIOS and it shows an AMI BIOS dated 1992 and a NO VERSION AVAILABLE message. Any ideas on this? How can I get in or what in the world would I use to flash it to a newer one? TIA, Jimi_l

Why risk loosing this old PC to a useless step in the installation of the operating system. Install win 95 OSR2 or Windows 98 first and some RAM up to 32 or maybe 64 Mo. This is a fair machine to surf the web but plenty enough for e-mails and occasional web work.Good luck.

Hi Jimi_I Older computers may require pressing a key combination such as Ctrl+Alt+S or Ctrl+Alt+Esc or Ctrl+Alt+Ins. Take care, Linda

Old Compaqs stored the BIOS setup utility on a special hidden partition, and if this was deleted you could not access it. I don't know if any others like Packard Bell did this or not, but it might be worth looking into. The combination for old Zenith computers was CTRL+ALT+INS, and most Compaqs used F10. I think for old Packard Bells you simply pressed F1, but I'm not certain.

I have 2 packard bells & both use different combination keys to enter bios. 1. F2 2. ctrl + alt + s Using the F2 key you have to press it after the memory count. ctrl+alt+s I can press this at the c: prompt in dos & it automactically boots to the cmos.

Thanks for the tips all :) I yanked the battery to see if on a reset it may come up. Thanks again, Jimi_l

You need a special machine or black box to flash your bios,you can download the software but this unit is called an EPROM PROGRAMMER they are quite expensive but there are people who can do it for you,like: A.S. KERKMEESTER BIKKERSHORN 13 9678 RH-- WESTERLEE THE NETHERLANDS,EUROPE The price is reasonable.