assorted pieces of random gobbledygook

The brand new Acer Core Duo laptop of a co-worker of mine refused to wake up from hibernation this morning. After rebooting, his Windows installation refused to boot up due to his computer allegedly missing ACPI support. His machine being a Windows box, this caused nothing more than a smirk and childish sniggering noises from my side when he told me. Interesed I got when he came back after having re-installed with the same media on a blank new hard drive and the same error reappeared. My colleague threw a Knoppix CD at him and off he went again. Later, eating Pizza at lunch I asked him to show me the output of dmesg. Now my eyebrows really curled: The Linux ACPI layer was complaining about a corrupt checksum on his ACPI tables! The real kicker however came when he called the Acer support hotline: “Yeah yeah”, the guy on the phone said. “Simply set the time ahead by a day and it’ll work again”. And indeed it did. Now, the thing I’m wondering about: Why on earth would some part of the BIOS initialization such as the decompression of the ACPI tables from the ROM chip where the BIOS is contained into RAM depend on the time of day??? Some disgruntled employee that decided to plant a logic bomb in the BIOS code that goes of on August, 30th 2006? Apparently Acer got caught by surprise as well since my co-worker was told that “[they] are in the process of [cobbling together] a firmware update for the issue”.

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