HP Desktop getting into bios

[tony draper]

Nephew has a Hewlet Packard desktop its a few years old now,having trouble getting a printer to work on same so I wanted to have a peek at the bios,the normal method doesn't work ie hitting del on booting up,anybody know how to access bios on A HP machine?
:confused:
Greatfull for any help.

[DaveO'Leary]

Hi
Is it mated with a serial port?

[effortless]

Hold down the CTRL+ALT+ESC keys while starting up. IIR

[frostbite]

Another possible is F8 during bootup.

[tony draper]

Thank you chaps may one take the liberty of asking a suplimentry question?.
Said computer was store bought and came with XP installed,said machines has many problem and nothing particulary important on the hard disk,I have XP PRO and was thinking of formating the disk and reloading a clean operating system,my experience of doing this with win 98 on machines bought with operating systems installed by the shop is lack of drivers,ie no driver disk for graphic/sound card/modem ect supplied with the machine
I know that XP comes with many more drivers in situ than win 98 did but am I liable to have trouble with third party graphic cards modems ect?
Again greatfull for any advice.
Incidently the machine is at brothers house and they do not have a internet connection if I needed to download new drivers,at a push I could bring it here I suppose
:rolleyes:

[Turn It Off]

If you are worried about driver disk being lost or correct drivers not available, I would suggest doing this work somewhere with an internet connection. Alternatively, get a list of the drivers before hand and make your own cd with the drivers on it.
With no internet connection you will be stumped if the drivers are not about.

[tony draper]

The problem I have had with that in the past is it tended to be the modem drivers that were adrift,but you are right I will do the job here.
The version of XP I have is the upgrade from windows 98,ie I have to load win98 first,I suppose if I just upgrade his version on XP to XP pro I will still have all the same problems at the end so I recon twill be best to do a completely clean instal.
Its ok chaps just thinking aloud
:rolleyes:
Another thunk strikes one,I have never formated a disk with XP on it,will my windows 98 floppy boot disk allow me to format the disk?,it would not allow me to format a disk I had with Win2k on it.

[effortless]

There maybe a hidden partition of your hdd which has all the cab files etc. the restore disc refers to this on resinstall. you do tend to lose data. I think that you access restore through bios setup.