BIOS Setup

Advanced CMOS Setup (Cont.)

• Password Checking Option (or Security Option): In the setup main setup we can set by means of the Change Password option a password that will be asked when your computer is turned on. By means of this option we can set up when this password will be required: whenever computer is powered on (Always or System option), only when one tries to access setup (Setup option). The configuration is done according to your discretion, and according to security policy.
• Swap Floppy Drive or Floppy Drive Swapping: This option allows unit A swapping with unit B. If you have a 5 ¼” unit A and a 3 ½” unit A, when this function is enabled the unit A will be a 3 ½” drive and the B unit, a 5 ¼” drive. As presently most computer have just one 3 ½” floppy unit installed, this option should stay disabled.
• PCI VGA Palette Snooping or VGA Palette Snoop: This option allows the compliance of older higher resolution video cards to the VGA standard. As presently all video boards are compliant to this standard, this option must stay disabled.
• Hard Disk Type 47 RAM Area or Extended ROM RAM Area or Extended BIOS RAM Area or Scratch RAM Option: This option configures how BIOS scratch area in RAM is accessed. There are two options: “DOS 1 KB” that reduces the 640 KB conventional memory to 639 KB and that uses this 1 KB area to access scratch area; or “0:300” that uses address 300h to access this scratch area. The first option is preferable once second option can frequently cause a conflict with the network board, as network boards often use address 300h to communicate with the processor. Presently this 1 KB memory loss is negligible.
• External Cache Memory or L2 Cache Memory: Enables L2 Cache Memory. Enable it, or else your computer will run too slowly.
• Internal Cache Memory or L1 Cache Memory: Enables L1 Cache Memory. Enable it, or else your computer will run too slowly.
• System BIOS Cacheable or System ROM Cacheable or System BIOS Cacheable: This option allows access to BIOS using memory cache speeding up the computer. We suggest you leave it enabled.
• Video BIOS Cacheable or Video Cacheable Option or Video ROM Cache: Same for Video board ROM memory. Enable this option.
• System ROM Shadow or Main BIOS Shadow or Adaptor ROM Shadow F000, 64K or F Segment Shadow: Shadow is a technique whereas ROM contents are copied into RAM which is then accessed in lieu of the ROM. This is done in order to improve computer performance, as ROM access time is longer than RAM. This option enables BIOS shadow, causing BIOS contents to be copied into RAM when the processor will then access BIOS copy stored in RAM and no more ROM memory Naturally we suggest this option stays enabled.
• Video ROM Shadow or Adaptor ROM Shadow C000, 32K or Adaptor ROM Shadow C400, 16K: Same for Video board ROM memory. We suggest this option stays enabled.
• Other Shadow options: The remaining shadow options should remain disabled, as there usually no further ROM memories in the computer, therefore there is no need to enable shadowing of other memory areas.