Leading Edge PC's

[griffinspc]

Using Google I couldn't find any current address for Leading Edge (the company) if there ever was one. There's something in Australia but I don't think that's it.

My son brought home a 486SE that needed work. It was in surprisingly good shape and I got it running pretty well, added an old sound card I had laying around, a 486DX2, a cd-rom and basic Win95. Not too bad for him and free.

The problem I have is that it has a 5 1/4 floppy (antique) and and now a cd but I can't get to the BIOS setup. Del, F-2, Ctrl anything doesn't seem to work. I need to have it quit searching the old floppy on boot and look at the CD.

Does any of our esteemed members have any background with Leading Edge package machines? You know, it came with monitor, keyboard, mouse and box all stamped "Leading Edge"

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"Finest Kind"

[loek]

if happens to me, and i kind find out fast enough how to get into the bios. i reboot and press down a key and keep it press down, after a few seconds i get a message keyboard failure, with message if i want to enter the bios and repair the failure.

effective but not the way it sopessed to be done.

[griffinspc]

Are you running a Leading Edge machine or do you mean you do this with every machine?

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"Finest Kind"

[RonF]

If that machine is old enough to have a 5 1/4 floppy it may be that it had a disk you needed to get into BIOS. You may be able to get there with loeks suggestion, I've had to do that myself on old machines.

As far as a BIOS that old looking at the CD, (for boot ?) I doubt it very much. If you can get into the BIOS it may support 3.5 in. 1.44 Mb floppys, so you cou go that route if needed.

LUCK

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OOOOOO ... Shiney, whats this do ?

[griffinspc]

Thanks guys. Yeah I thought of that, it being too old, since on boot it doesn't even show the chip set or any info re: disks, cpu etc. The one thing that leads me to beleive it's not a true antique is that I found remenents of MS Works on it.

I'll try loeks suggestion tonight. By the way it has a 3.5 floppy too and it's being accessed as well on boot but I want to remove the 5 1/4 drive altogether and don't need it searching for it.

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"Finest Kind"

[ChuckG]

griffin- You may want to give this a shot.
http://www.rainbowdatainc.com/files.html

[gwatkins]

My son had an old Leading Edge machine; they are no longer made, although I think the company may still be in existence.
As to your problem with set-up, my first computer was a Packard Bell and you could enter set-up with the unlikely combination of ctrl-esc from a dos prompt. Don't know that it will work on your machine, but the cost of trying is pretty low.
Good luck.

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GHW

[griffinspc]

Super Slueth Chuck. How did you find that and yes there's a list of calls and programs that may help.

Thanks gwatkins. I'll try that 1st. Ctrl / Esc from a DOS prompt, what will they think of next.

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"Finest Kind"

[magtecln]

this is a pretty much fail-safe way of getting into the setup that i figured out on an old gateway2k 486 with some antiquated phoenix bios release: disconnect the ide cable from the harddrive and power her up. it will create a fixed disk error and should give you the option of entering setup.

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