WHAT WOULD BE CONSIDERED "MINIMUM" BIOS settings?

[medford420]

I am trying to install Windows 2000 Pro. and would like to set my BIOS to its most minimum settings. What settings in particular need to be adjusted? At the moment I have only necessary hardware components installed.

medford420

 

[ceh4702]

Wonder what minimum hardware means??

To me it means only a floppy an old PCI video card and using a floppy Boot Disk.

If you are not using any USB devices or AGP video card disable the USB and set the video to PCI if that is what you are using. Sometimes you have to have USB enabled to use AGP cards. If you are only using one IDE port (primary), disable the secondary IDE. Sometimes you can get away with this if you BIOS supports it.

There are a few other things like Using RAM for Video Bios Shadowing. and disabling IRQ's for the PCI slots if they are vacant etc. You can also disable Printer/Serial Ports if they are not used.

For drives, you have the option to use DMA which you can use or not use. Basically there are different levels of DMA that drives can use. DMA, I think, stands for Direct Memory Allocation, or something like that. It allows for data to be accessed on a drive without going through the Processor. It does this by sending messages and using memory to store switces to notify the processor when the process is complete or activated. The more you use this the less your processor works. It does take extra memory allocation to control it. This comes in handy when reading hard drives and CDROMS, etc. If a drive already has a large cache to make it run faster, I don't know how much this helps or hurts.

There are some other settings like Wake up on ring, wake up on mouse movement, wake up on keyboard press that also uses resources by the processor. If the computer uses these, some program or process has to be running to watch for when to wake up. The same goes for some of the newer settings that allow the computer to resume after a power interruption or similar actions. I also like to make the computer check everything upon startup. Like a memory check and a verification of a floppy disk if you have one. this slows the boot process a little. In the beginning this can be good thing.

There are many settings that can be on Auto in a lot of BIOS settings. A lot of newer BIOS have this as default. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.