Mailing the story:
dmidecode: What's it good for?
You know you're living in a cutthroat world when your BIOS lies to your operating system at boot time. Yet that's exactly what often happens, to one degree or another, depending on the manufacturer and model of the system. Some of the BIOS lies cause problems for Linux and some don't. The dmidecode project provides the means to learn exactly what claims your BIOS is making about your hardware. Strange as it might seem, it's useful information, even when it's not 100% reliable.