WTB: EEPROM Programmer

[pseudolobster]

Hey all,

I bricked my laptop when windows bluescreened during a BIOS flash, toshiba won't honor the warranty, and places in town say they'll need to replace the entire motherboard, which will be at least $400...

SO, I'd like to buy an EEPROM programmer and do it myself... though I really have no idea what I'm looking for.

it will need to be able to flash a 1mbit winbond flash chip in a SOP8 package, as well, in the future I'd like to play with PIC microcontrollers and maybe flashing NES cartridges etc. I'd prefer if it were USB, since I don't know if I have a parallel port..

I have just under $100 to spend on this, but would prefer if it were as cheap as possible.

Does anyone have one they'd be able to sell, or know of a quality brand/model they could link me to?

Cheers!

 

[potatorage]

Why were you trying to flash your bios?

 

[pseudolobster]

Why were you trying to flash your bios?

toshiba bioses have notoriously buggy DSDT tables, making it impossible for non-microsoft operating systems to correctly address the pci-e bus.. therefore no wifi in linux or macos. there was a problem with keyboard repeat rate, there was a problem with resuming from sleep mode, and the old bios would not support any cpu faster than the stock cpu which I was planning on replacing... and a few other things, I can't remember now..

most of these problems other people wouldn't notice or care about, but they consistently pissed me off on a daily basis... I was using a toshiba-provided utility designed to fix toshiba shortcomings and bugs, they don't provide a dos version, as soon as I saw the windows flashing program I knew there was a chance for disaster, but I flashed anyways, hoping to get rid of these problems... anyways, they won't honor the warranty, they kept asking me to right click my computer and hit properties, no matter how many times I yelled "THE COMPUTER WILL NOT TURN ON, THERE IS NOTHING ON THE SCREEN"... anyways, rant, rant, rant, I am never, ever, ever, buying a toshiba laptop again.

 

[drlava]

I have one of these:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370061078511
it can flash about anything with adapters (they have them too)
and any pic with winprog.

 

[pseudolobster]

Hmm... thanks drlava, that seems really reasonably priced...

do you know how the adapters work? are they just sockets directly connected to the standard pins on the programmer, or is there some sort of active circuitry on them? it'd be nice if I could just solder 8 wires onto this chip and stuff it into the programmer and skip having to track down an adapter.