The latest AMI BIOS setup illustrated tutorial

What is BIOS?

The BIOS is the English "basic Input Output system" abbreviation, after literal translation after the Chinese name is "the basic input to export systems". Its full name should be Rom-bios, which means read-only memory basic input and output system. In fact, it is a group of curing to the computer motherboard on the previous ROM chip program, it holds the computer's most important basic input and output of the program, system settings information, power-on on the Self-Test program and the system to start the bootstrap process. Its main function is to provide the lowest, most direct hardware setup and control for the computer.

BIOS Setup program Interface

What is the difference between the BIOS and the CMOS?

CMOS (Complementary metel-oxide Semiconductor) is an abbreviation for complementary metal oxide semiconductors. It is meant to be a technology used in the manufacture of LSI chips or chips made from this technology. This usually refers to a read-write RAM chip on the computer's motherboard. It stores the real-time clock information and hardware configuration information of the computer system. When the system is booting the machine, it reads the CMOS information to initialize the state of each part of the machine. It relies on the system power supply and back-up battery to power, the system will not lose the power of information lost.

CMOS RAM Storage Device

Since the CMOS and BIOS are closely related to the computer system settings, there is the idea of CMOS settings and BIOS settings. As a result, beginners often confuse the two. CMOS RAM is where the system parameters are stored, and the System Setup program in the BIOS is the means to complete the parameter setup. Therefore, the accurate statement should be through the BIOS setup program to set the CMOS parameters. What we normally say about CMOS settings and BIOS settings is its simplified version, which in some ways creates confusion between the two concepts.

In fact, the BIOS program is stored in the CMOS memory, CMOS is a semiconductor technology, can be a pair of metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) integrated on a piece of silicon. This technique is commonly used in the production of RAM and switching applications, and the products produced by it are very quickly consumed with very low power consumption and have a high tolerance for interference with power supply. Specifically to us this refers to the computer host board a special RAM chip, this small block of RAM is usually 128k bytes or 256k bytes, but now with the development of the computer, this RAM capacity is also increasing, many motherboards are currently using 2M or even 4M of memory. Of course, the role of CMOS RAM is to save the hardware configuration of the system and user settings for certain parameters.

If you do not understand, then the simplest to tell you that the BIOS is a set of procedures, can be understood as software, and CMOS is a memory chip.

Why is it dangerous to set up a BIOS?

As we said earlier, CMOS has the most basic information of computer equipment, that is, the lowest level of information, and the BIOS setup program is to regulate these low-level information. The BIOS setting directly determines the work of the hardware and is a set of programs that deal directly with the hardware. The operating system needs the BIOS to control the hardware, so the BIOS can be understood as a bridge between the hardware and the operating system, so the BIOS setting is really dangerous because of the direct control of the hardware.