PC Hardware A Beginner’s Guide

(^122) PC Hardware: A Beginner’s Guide
To review or modify the system setu pdata, a.k.a. the BIOS or CMOS configuration, press
the key indicated by the BIOS (usuallyDELor a function key such asF1orF2), which will
open the setup program and display its configuration menu.
Standard Settings
Most Pentium or newer computers have two levels of setup configuration settings: stan-
dard settings and advanced features. The standard settings include most of the basic
setup information, including the system clock, hard disk drives, floppy drives, and the
video adapter, plus the processor type, memory type and speed, and the amount and
type of memory.
Advanced Features
The advanced features, which are very specific to the combination of motherboard, proces-
sor, and chipset on a PC, are accessed through the BIOS setup program. There is no standard
set of advanced configuration features and settings. However, the following list contains a
sample of advanced feature configuration settings commonly found on most BIOSs:

System BIOS Cacheable Sets whether the system BIOS is to be cached to
memory address F0000–FFFFFh, which usually results in faster performance.
 Video BIOS Cacheable Sets whether the video adapter’s BIOS is to be cached
to memory address C0000–7FFFh to speed video operations.
 Video RAM Cacheable Enables the caching of video RAM to memory
address A0000–AFFFFh.
 Auto Configuration If enabled, the configuration is based on the default
values of the motherboard chipset.
BIOS Keystroke
AMI BIOS DEL
Award BIOS DELETE OR CTRL-ALT-ESC
IBM Aptiva F1
Compaq F10
Phoenix BIOS F2
Table 6-5. BIOS Setup Program Access Keys