Little Ben - HP Vectra VL6 6 Technical Reference Manual

2 System Board
Devices on the ISA Bus
Updating the BIOS Before Considering Replacing the System Board
If the computer is faulty, but it starts up correctly, and the fault is not clearly
due to the system board hardware, then it is advisable to check the BIOS
version number. The BIOS version number can be found from the summary
screen, or the Setup program, obtained by pressing
when the computer has just been restarted, as described in Chapter 4.
If it is not the current version of the BIOS, the System ROM should be
flashed with the new version, as described on the previous page. The
computer should then be re-run to see if this has cleared the problem.

Little Ben

Little Ben is an HP application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), designed
to be a companion to the Super I/O chip. It interfaces between the chip-set
and the processor, and contains the following:
• BIOS timer
hardware wired 50 ms long 880 Hz beep module.
automatic blinker that feeds the LEDs module with a 1 Hz oscillator
signal.
• security protection (access, flash and anti-virus protection)
For 128, 256 or 512 KB Flash EEPROMs.
For the Super I/O space: the Serial EEPROM, serial ports, parallel port
and mass storage drives (disable write on Flexible Disk Drive, disable
boot on any drive, disable use of any embedded drive)
• hard and soft control for the power supply (available with Windows NT
and Windows 95, but not with OS/2)
• Advanced power management (APM) version 1.2 (available with Win-
dows 95 and OS/2, but not with Windows NT)
• glue logic (such as programmable chip selects)
The computer can be turned on by typing the space-bar on the keyboard, or
when it receives an external signal from a network board. When VccState
and PowerGood pins are both low, all output pins are in tri-state mode,
except for RemoteOnBen which continues to be driven. The power
consumption has been kept as low as possible. This allows the computer to
be powered from the standby power supply, and to be restarted even after a
power loss has occurred.
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