I’m having freezes in Ubuntu 7.10 with increasing frequency, so an upgrade is getting more urgent. I decided, having done some reading on the web, to first upgrade the bios on my HP Pavillion 6558ea, and after some difficulty in finding the right webpage, I came across this curious note:

Fixes

# Modifies the thermal policy to lower the local alert temperature.
# Fixes an intermittent issue where the notebook does not detect the hard drive when booting.

An intermittent issue where the notebook does not detect the hard drive when booting sounds suspiciously like what’s been happening. It’s really extraordinary that a company of HP’s reputation would release a computer with this fault.

Anyway, the procedure went well - done in Vista of course. I’m not sure that I’ve noticed any difference, but hopefully the freezing will now stop.

I’ve been reading very mixed reviews about Ubuntu 8.04 but I’ll give it a go shortly.

If you have an HP Pavillion 6558ea, this is the page for the Winflash bios upgrade (Release Date: 2008-04-25, Version: F.53)