Use bios from Toshiba Satellite 3000 on a Satellite 2800-202?

[coyotito]

I'm considering this option because the Satellite 2800 is limited to 192 mb ram (64 mb soldered on + 128 mb SD100 ram).
I bought a 256 mb chip but the bios does not accept it.

The machines are not all that different, the 300 has a cpu that is about 250mhz faster and a nvidia Geforce video instead of the Savage chip on the 2800.
Some of the later 2800s did support 128+256 mb but the bios files come packaged together, does not seem possible to choose the 'wrong' one ..

So, is this likely to brick my old Toshiba?

 

[CaedenV]

Why on earth would you even bother? Do they even have wireless internet on them?

As far as my understanding goes with this (and no, I have never tried it myself) you could theoretically swap the physical bios chips, and then flash it for the motherboard you intend to use it on. Problem is that the RAM address limitation is likely in the BIOS software, not the chip itself, so I am not sure if it will work. BIOS is motherboard specific, so you cannot just flash a motherboard with the BIOS of another motherboard. (though you could try... all you would loose is a little pentium 3 which is more of a gain than a loss).

That being said, go buy yourself some little $300 Acer netbooks and be amazed at the raw computational and graphical power they possess!

 

[coyotito]

quote:
Why on earth would you even bother? Do they even have wireless internet on them?

Sure, they have 2 usb1 ports wifi no problem. the pcmcia ethernet card died and i bought a $8 usb ethernet from ebay..

well, if the limitation is in BIOS software swapping should be no problem..
But it's more likely to be a motherboard circuit problem i have read.., so then it will not help, using another bios will in the best case change nothing.

You're right, I could get one of these cheap netbooks. But I don't really need all that raw power, and I often work in this big reading hall and having
this old piece there means no worry about thieves. With 192 mb sloow sd100 ram it still runs Abiword, web browser and a couple of dictionaries and terminals and a light file browser ok (Linux of course).

Little risk here as you say but it will most likely brick the pc. What I'll do is get a better laptop, can get a 1.6 ghz 512 ram 40 gb for $110

 

[coyotito]

thanks for answer caedenv. Physical swapping of chips is not an option as I only have one of these machines. Flashing the bios is the only possibility. This is quite easy, Toshiba still provides the bios updates on their website.

Modding the bios with cbrom will not work because this is a rather unusual bios it seems (and anyway you need to know what you're doing to mod a bios).

So what I can try to do is run a bios update for Satellite 2805 series. Now the reason this bios adresses more memory is that it had an nvidia video card that needed more ram.
So it's quite likely the pc will die or at least some hardware stop working as the machines are
somewhat different.