Received my 8200 (a refurb) just before Christmas and it had BIOS Ver A00 and from date of receipt to mid February I had 6 or 7 spurious shut-downs but then I run it 24/7 so didn't think too awful much until reading the Forum. Updated it to Ver A03 and it's just about a month and have not had it do a spurious shutdown since the upgrade and found no anomolies with it and the addition of the F12 startup menu option was a nice touch. As with any other upgrade make sure you have backed up your pertinent and important data prior to performing the steps but it went pretty flawless for me and my 8200 running XP. Regards.....

banjo




Dimension 8200
P4 1.8GHz
512 Mb PC800 RDRAM
60Gb HDD (Maxtor)
64mb GeForce2 MX w/TV out card
15" Flat Panel
16-10-40 CDRW (Samsung)
16x DVD (NEC)
Dell Quietkey keyboard
Microsoft USB Infra Wheel IntelliMouse
Altec Lansing Wireless Speaker System
SB Live
Cambridge Sound Works FPS2000 speakers
HP 4L Laser Printer via USB extension
HP 1315 PhotoSmart Printer w/SmartMedia drive
UMAX Astra 3400 Scanner
10/100 PCI Fast Ethernet NIC
3 Belkin F5U001 USB Hubs
eUSB SmartMedia Adapter
Logitech WingMan Force USB
Logitech Webcam Pro 3000 w/mic
Westfall DSL Modem via Verizon
Win XP Home Edition
Win XP Sm Bus Office
Norton Utilities System Works
Zone ALarm
IE 6.0, Netscape 4.7 and 6.2 and Real1Player
Sevice Tag 5QVS011
BIOS Ver A03



Message Edited on 03/12/02 01:09PM by fishnbanjo

I have experienced random restarts but it was due to a conflict with BlackIce Defender. Removing BID corrected the problem. I believe in the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". That's why I'm still using BIOS A01 on my machine and I will not upgrade unless I have a specific problem A03 will correct.

I have been running it for a while (since January.) I have never experienced any spurious shutdowns, even before I applied the BIOS.

Charles,
Tag # 6VMY111

Dimension 8200, Bios A03
1.8 ghz P4
256 mb Ram
80 gb HD
NVidia GEForce3 TI200
Dell M991 monitor
Sanyo 308B DVD/CDRW combo
Telephony modem
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound (SCR4142 driver)
Altec Lansing ADA995 (1BT)
Windows XP Home
Office XP Pro (retail)
Power DVD 4 (retail upgrade)
Norton SystemWorks 2002 (retail)

Like wise, I upgraded to A03 due to shutdowns and it fixed the problems. I have the same system as Kanuk001.

Hello, Put me in the A03 users group that have not had any shutdown problems. Mike

I installed the A03 version last night and I have seen a single spurious shutdown. But, time will tell. I was only on my PC for about half an hour after installing the newest version.