A way to find the BIOS date on an Aero:

      Cold boot your Aero.
      When the cursor goes to the top right corner press F10
      If you have not repartitioned your Aero, it will boot the DIAG partition
     on your internal hard disk
      Press return through two screens, then choose the top choice in the
     Setup/Diagnostics menu....
      the BIOS date prints under the CPU ICON, and the Video ROM date prints
     out under the VIDEO ICON.

[A] Isn't it as easy as just running MSD. Click on the button "Computer..." It
shows a BIOS date.

[A] To get the date of your bios currently in your aero go into debug and type:
df00:ffe6.

[Q] What I still am worried about is that I cannot tell the BIOS date from the
information in a ROMPaq *without* installing it.

[A] To find the date of the BIOS image, just create the ROMPaq install disk and
look at the date of the "shadow" file. On most ROMPaqs there are more than one
different ROM image for the various different Compaq portables ... the one
named "shadow" something or other is for the Aero ..