W
hen man first booted
the PC, he saw the BIOS
screen: a jumble of
monochromatic numbers that made
about as much sense as the binary
language of load lifters. Sadly, not
much about the BIOS has changed
since the DeLorean and skinny ties
were cool. Decades later, in our
modern, visual-based world, we’re
still greeted with a screen full of
text from machines 1,000 times
faster than those that were around
when the ol’ BIOS was born.
Most PC lightweights simply ignore
the BIOS and wait for their OSes to
take over. Power users, however, know
that the BIOS can be a friendly and
rewarding place to go spelunking.
So just what the hell is the BIOS?
Short for Basic Input Output System,
the BIOS is a tiny bit of soft ware
embedded in your motherboard
that gets executed when your PC is
turned on. The BIOS is responsible for
chores such as sizing up the amount
of available RAM, detecting the hard
drives, and setting the CPU speed.
Once the system house-cleaning isdone, the BIOS boots the OS from the
hard drive and hands over control.
Even though there are only two
BIOS makers for consumer desktops
today, AMI and Award/Phoenix, amultitude of BIOS variants exists.
In fact, a Gigabyte board using
an Award BIOS can bear little
resemblance to an Asus board using
an Award BIOS.
In motherboards designed for
enthusiasts, board makers typically
unmask as many controls as possible.
Unfortunately, the dizzying array of
options includes both safe and unsafe
tweaks. While some tweaks will just
leave you with a system that refuses to
boot, others can do long-term harm.
So if you feel the least bit uneasy
about even changing the boot order
of your rig’s drives, you may not want
to muck around too much in the BIOS.
If, however, you’re comfortable with
the prospect of a little trial and error,
it’s time you dive in and discover the
many secrets your BIOS holds.
How do you get into your BIOS?
Reboot the system and then hit DEL,
F1, or F2 within a few seconds of the
machine POSTing. If your machine
has a splash screen that doesn’t show
anything, try hitting Escape, which
should reveal the ugly DOS-looking
screen underneath. Only Intel-branded boards still require jumpers
to be thrown to access all of the BIOS
features. Power down, look for the
BIOS Setup Confi guration Jumper, set
it to 2-3, and power up.http://www.maximumpc.com | NOV 08 | MAXIMUMPC |*(