Welcome to Africa, a few days in Johannesburg.

I have been in Joburg since Tuesday. So far this place has been rather eventful. Within 10 minutes of clearing customs I stumbled around half awake waiting for my luggage to appear and managed to loss my passport. I couldn't find it and nobody had turned it into the lost and found. I didn't want to but had to assume the worst and filed a police report on the missing passport. After wandering the airport for a hour and a half filing reports and checking the lost property, Ros, the wife of my second cousin, and I finally made our way back to their place in Randburg. I checked my email to find that my passport had been turned into the BA desk and being held there for safe keeping. So after lunch we drove back to the airport to retrieve my passport. Les Woops.

Since my cousins' computer was working really slow I decided to help them upgrade the RAM as it was woefully inadiquate. We went out the next day and got some RAM for 1/4 the price that their computer guy had quoted and I installed it. However, it didn't work quite right, the 1024 MB stick was only showing up at 512 MB. I found this strange and check into the current revision of the BIOS (this is the Basic Input Output System; the lowest level of a computer which controls everything). I have upgrade many of these in the past and found that there was an online upgrade program. As per the normal procedure (since this is one thing that can physically break you computer) I made a rescue disk. In the 20 or so BIOS upgrades I have done over the years I have never had to use one of these. So off I went with the MSI (Microstar) Live Update and sure enough, the firmware upgrade finished completely and then failed after 2% of the verification process. No matter what I did, I could not get it to reprogram properly. So I rebooted in hopes of using the recovery disk to reflash the BIOS. Lets just say that it didn't work and the screen wasn't even online all I got was several beeps indicated a video output failured. A touch of panic set in as I had just destroyed my cousin's work computer and it was old enough to be unable to replace the motherboard with a new one.

With the laptop that was still functional I did some research into it. Apprently I was only one of many who had destroyed their BIOS for their MSI MS-7222 mother boards and the forums showed discussion on recovery methods from Feb 2007. You think MSI would have atleast gone to the trouble of preventing more people from doing this but apparently that falls outside their realm of concern for their customers. The forum suggested a few idea on how to repair it using a boot floppy (who has these anymore) and also contacting MSI in the Neatherlands where they might ship a new BIOS flash part which could be place on the board. I decided to follow both avenues for repair. I sent an email to MSI field application engineers requesting assistance (to which I still haven't gotten a reply) and create a boot disk. To do this I would go to the computer store where we bought the RAM.
This morning Ros dropped me at the computer store to attempt the recovery process. I had to remove the floppy disk drive from the dead computer because the shop didn't have any functionat 3.5" floppy drive that worked and when through the process of trying to create the boot disk to reflash the BIOS. After 4 hours of struggling I gave up and called Ros to be picked up.

My next avenue for success would be to track down a replacement mainboard and possibly call MSI for assistance. By this time Ros was starting to get a bit stressed over the status of her computer and with reason. Restoring a BIOS is no trivial task and the prospects were looking increasingly bleak. I didn't think there was a location in the area which would have a programmer and without home ice advantage I didn't even know the names of potential place that might even have programmers.

I decide to use what I had learn of distribution and support from my time at Xantrex and look into who the distributor of MSI was for South Africa. Thankfully there was only one and they were located in Midrand which I had never heard of. I called them and they pass me through to technical support who assured me they had a programmer and could program it but without any guarantee that it would work. All I had to do was bring down the chip and/or PC to be programmed with an image of the BIOS that I wanted put on it. As it would turn out, Midrand was between Johannesburg and Pretoria only about a 30 minute drive.

Ok, so now the situation was under control, we had a solution that could work. The only problem was that the alarm company was outfitting Les and Ros' house with additional security since there had been a crime wave in their neighbourhood so she could go. Les had appointments and was unable to drive me. So they had their Afrikaans employee drive me over there. I got quite the treat spending time with him. He knew quite a lot of history of the area and had mentioned that Ghandi had in fact lived in South Africa and was hiding in some caves near Johannesburg before he went back to India because they believe he was an illegal alien. This is in part where Mandela learn his peaceful approach to change.

Finally, I arrived at the MSI distributor's office and had the BIOS flashed and a sticked of 1GB RAM that worked for the mainboard. The computer all repaired I breathed a sigh of relief an returned to Les and Ros' triumphant.

So far, I have met a few South African and they have been a pleasure to work with. Tomorrow should be interesting and I know that my time in Waterval will be fun. Tomorrow night I go to Matthew, Les and Ros' son's restaurant for dinner. Ironically he is a the owner and chief of a french restaurant. So while I didn't eat much french cuisine in France I will get my chance in South Africa.