Bios in a sentence

Starting around the mid-1990s, it became typical for the BIOS ROM to include a "BIOS configuration utility" (BCU citation ) or "BIOS setup utility", accessed at system power-up by a particular key sequence.

There is also extra protection from accidental BIOS rewrites in the form of boot blocks which are protected from accidental overwrite or dual and quad BIOS equipped systems which may, in the event of a crash, use a backup BIOS.

If you had any custom BIOS settings like fan profiles, overclocking, or specific drive configurations, you will need to redo those settings after resetting or updating the BIOS.

The default “Performance” BIOS uses the configuration described above, but a secondary “Silent” BIOS focuses on improved acoustics and temperatures by sacrificing some performance.

A BIOS might be reflashed in order to upgrade to a newer version to fix bugs or provide improved performance or to support newer hardware, or a reflashing operation might be needed to fix a damaged BIOS.

A boot menu such as the textual menu of Windows, which allows users to choose an operating system to boot, to boot into the safe mode, or to use the last known good configuration, is displayed through BIOS and receives keyboard input through BIOS.

Also, when errors occur at boot time, a modern BIOS usually displays user-friendly error messages, often presented as pop-up boxes in a TUI style, and offers to enter the BIOS setup utility or to ignore the error and proceed if possible.

As a result, it is not as easy to learn the intimate details about the many non-IBM additions to BIOS as about the core BIOS services.

A software engineer was hired to write the special "dual boot mode" BIOS and the special CP/M BIOS.

Before the BIOS Boot Specification was promulgated, this was the only way for expansion ROMs to implement boot capability for devices not supported for booting by the native BIOS of the motherboard.

BIOS extension ROMs gain total control of the machine, so they can in fact do anything, and they may never return control to the BIOS that invoked them.

BIOS services are not used by modern multitasking operating systems after they initially load, so the importance of the primary part of BIOS is greatly reduced from what it was initially.

Drivers can use APM function calls to notify the BIOS about CPU usage, but it is up to the BIOS to act on this information; a driver cannot directly tell the CPU to go into a power saving state.

If the boot block detects any corruption in the main BIOS, it will typically warn the user that a recovery process must be initiated by booting from removable media (floppy, CD or USB flash drive) so the user can try flashing the BIOS again.

Instead of battery-backed RAM, the modern Wintel machine may store the BIOS configuration settings in flash ROM, perhaps the same flash ROM that holds the BIOS itself.

Most PC motherboard suppliers license a BIOS "core" and toolkit from a commercial third-party, known as an "independent BIOS vendor" or IBV.

Originally, BIOS firmware was stored in a ROM chip on the PC motherboard; in modern computer systems, the BIOS contents are stored on flash memory so it can be rewritten without removing the chip from the motherboard.

The DOS-BIOS or System BIOS would then combine multiple physical sectors into logical sectors for the file system to work with.

The effect of the publication of the BIOS listings is that anyone can see exactly what a definitive BIOS does and how it does it.

Then it can replace the BIOS boot process with one of its own, or it can merely modify the boot sequence by inserting its own boot actions into it, by preventing the BIOS from detecting certain devices as bootable, or both.