Advance CMOS Setup (Part II)
•Hard Disk Type 47 RAM Area: The BIOS has to place the HD type 47 data somewhere in memory. You can choose between DOS memory or PC BIOS (or peripheral card) memory area 0:300. DOS memory is valuable, you only have 640KB of it. So you should try to use 0:300 memory area instead. There may be some peripheral card which needs this area too (sound card, network card, whatever). So if there are some fancy cards in your PC, check the manuals if they're using the 0:300 area. But in most cases this will work without checking. This is redundant if BIOS is shadowed (maybe not in very old BIOSes). The RAM area can be verified by checking address of int41h and int46h. These are fixed disk parameters blocks. If they point to the BIOS area, BIOS made modification of parameters before mapping RAM there.
•Wait for If Any Error: When the boot sequence encounter an error it asks you to press F1. Only at 'non-fatal' errors. If disabled, the system prints a warning and continues to boot without waiting for you to press any keys. Enabled recommended. Disabled if you want the system to operate as a server without a keyboard.
•System Boot Up Num Lock: Specify if you want the Num Lock key to be activated at boot up. Some like it, some do not. MS-DOS (starting with 6.0, maybe earlier) allows a "NUMLOCK=" directive in config.sys, too; if someone turns the BIOS flag off but has NUMLOCK=ON in their configuration file, they may be a bit perturbed.
•Numeric Processor Test: Enabled if you have a math coprocessor (built in for the 486DX, 486DX2, 486DX3 and Pentium - 586 - family). Disabled if you don't (386SX, 386DX, 486SX, 486SLC and 486DLC). If disabled, your FPU (Floating Point Unit, if present) isn't recognized as present by the system and will therefore significantly decrease the performance of your system.
•Weitek Coprocessor: If you have Weitek FPU, enable. If you have not, disable. This high performance FPU has 2-3 times the performance of the Intel FPU. Weitek uses some RAM address space, so memory from this region must be remapped somewhere else. This setting is normally found on 386 motherboards.
•Floppy Drive Seek at Boot: Power up your A: floppy drive at boot. Disabled recommended for faster boot sequence and for reduced damage to heads. Disabling the floppy drive, changing the system boot sequence and setting a BIOS password are good techniques for adding some security to a PC.
•System Boot Sequence: What drive the system checks first for an operating system. C:, A: recommended for faster boot sequence, or to not allow any user to enter your system by booting from the FDD if your autoexec.bat starts with a login procedure. A:, C: if the person who uses the computer is someone who don't knows how to setup CMOS. Because if something fails and a boot floppy won't work, many users won't know what to do next. However, be careful. You had better know this setting is turned on and be prepared to turn it off if your hard disk boot track becomes corrupted, but not obviously absent, since you otherwise won't be able to boot from floppy. Also, it's easy to fool yourself into thinking you booted from a known virus-free floppy when it actually booted from the (virus-infested) hard drive.
•System Boot Up CPU speed: Specify at what processor speed the system will boot from. Usual settings are HIGH and LOW. HIGH recommended. If you encounter booting problems, you may try LOW. You may also change the CPU speed with Ctrl-Alt +.
•External Cache Memory: Enabled if you have external cache memory (better known as L2 cache memory). This is a frequent error in CMOS setup as if Disabled when you have cache memory, the system performance decreases significantly. Most systems have from 64K to 512K of external cache. It is a cache between the CPU and the system bus. Different operating systems may address different levels of cache memory. For instance, DOS and Windows can address up to 64K at one time while Windows 95, OS/2 and Windows NT can address larger memory spaces. So, don't buy 256K of cache is you are using a DOS environment with less than 8MB of memory. It will not improve much the performance of your system. If Enabled when the system does not have cache memory, the system will freeze most of the time.
•Internal Cache Memory: Enable or disable the internal cache memory of the CPU (better known as L1 cache memory). Disabled for 386 and Enabled for 486 (1 to 8KB of internal CPU cache). If the CPU does not have internal cache, the system may freeze if enabled.
In many AMI and AWARD BIOSes, the two previous options are implemented either as separate Internal and External Enable/Disable options, or as a single option (Cache Memory : Disabled/Internal/Both).
