Advance CMOS Setup (Part III)

•Fast Gate A20 Option: Enabled recommended. A20 refers to the first 64KB of extended memory (A0 to A19) known as the "high memory area". This option uses the fast gate A20 line, supported in some chipsets, to access memory above 1 MB. Normally all RAM access above 1 MB is handled through the keyboard controller chip (8042 or 8742). Using this option will make the access faster than the normal method. This option is very useful in networking and multitasking operating systems.

•Turbo Switch Function: Enables or disables the turbo switch. Disabled recommended. This setting is now removed since there are no need to switch from normal to turbo modes.

•Shadow Memory Cacheable: You increase speed by copying ROM to RAM. Do you want to increase it by cacheing it? Yes or no - see Video BIOS Area cacheable. Yes recommended for MS-DOS and OS/2. Linux and other Unix-like operating systems will not use the cached ROMs and will benefit from the additional available memory if they are not cached.

•Password Checking Option: Setup password to have access to the system and / or to the setup menu. Good if the computer is to be shared with several persons and you don't want anyone (friends, sister, etc.) to mess up with the BIOS. Default password: AMI (if you have AMI BIOS). Award: BIOSTAR or AWARD_SW for newer versions (Note: I even know a computer store that kept standard AWARD BIOS configuration with their systems because they didn't know what the default password was!).

•Video ROM Shadow C000, 32K: Memory hidden under the "I/O hole" from 0x0A0000 to 0x0FFFFF may be used to "shadow" ROM (Read-Only Memory). Doing so, the contents of the ROM are copied into the RAM and the RAM is used instead, which is obviously faster. Video BIOS is stored in slow EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) chips (120 to 150ns of access time). Also, ROM is 8 or 16 bit while RAM 32 bit wide access. With Shadow on, the EPROM content is copied to RAM (60 to 80ns of access time with 32 bit wide access). Therefore performance increases significantly. Only sensible on EGA/VGA systems. Enabled recommended. If you have flash BIOS (EEPROM), you can disable it. Flash BIOS enables access at speeds similar to memory access so you can use the memory elsewhere. However, flash BIOS is still only accessing it at the speed of the bus (ISA, EISA or VLB). On systems where the BIOS automatically steals 384K of RAM anyway, it shouldn't hurt to enable shadowing even on flash ROM. One side effect is that you will not be able to modify the contents of flash ROM when the chip is shadowed. If you reconfigure an adapter which you think might have flash ROM, and your changes are ignored, or of course if it gives you an error message when you try to change them, you'll need to temporarily disable shadowing that adapter. On (S)VGA you should enable both video shadows. Some video cards maybe using different addresses than C000 and C400. If it is the case, you should use supplied utilities that will shadow the video BIOS, in which case you should disable this setting in the CMOS. Video BIOS shadowing can cause software like XFree86 (the free X Window System) to hang. They should be probably be disabled if you run any of the 386 unixes.
Some cards map BIOS or other memory not only in the usual a0000-fffff address range, but also just below the 16MB border or at other places. The BIOS (for PCI buses only?) now allows to create a hole in the address range where the card sits. The hole may be enabled by giving an address, then a size is requested in power of 2, 64k - 1MB.

•Adaptor ROM Shadow C800,16K: Disabled. Those addresses (C800 to EC00) are for special cards, e.g. network and controllers. Enable only if you've got an adapter card with ROM in one of these areas. It is a BAD idea to use shadow RAM for memory areas that aren't really ROM, e.g. network card buffers and other memory-mapped devices. This may interfere with the card's operation. To intelligently set these options you need to know what cards use what addresses. Most secondary display cards (like MDA and Hercules) use the ROM C800 address. Since they are slow, shadowing this address would improve their performance. An advanced tip: in some setups it is possible to enable shadow RAM without write-protecting it; with a small driver (UMM) it is then possible to use this 'shadow RAM' as UMB (Upper Memory Block) space. This has speed advantages over UMB space provided by EMM386. Some BIOSes have three options per 16KB/32KB/64KB block; e.g. disable - shadow ROM - shadow RAM or disable - shadow/WP - shadow (WP = write protect) the third option is for upper memory.

•Adaptor ROM Shadow CC00,16K: Disabled. Some hard drive adapters use that address.

•Adaptor ROM Shadow D000,16K: Disabled. D000 is the default Address for most Network Interface Cards.

•Adaptor ROM Shadow D400,16K: Disabled. Some special controllers for four floppy drives have a BIOS ROM at D400..D7FF.

•Adaptor ROM Shadow D800,16K: Disabled

•Adaptor ROM Shadow DC00,16K: Disabled

•Adaptor ROM Shadow E000,16K: Disabled. E000 is a good "out of the way" place to put the EMS page frame. If necessary.

•Adaptor ROM Shadow E400,16K: Disabled

•Adaptor ROM Shadow E800,16K: Disabled

•Adaptor ROM Shadow EC00,16K: Disabled. SCSI controller cards with their own BIOS could be accelerated by using Shadow RAM. Some SCSI controllers do have some RAM areas too, so it depends on the brand.
Some SCSI adapters do not use I/O-Addresses. The BIOS address range contains writable addresses, which in fact are the I/O-ports. This means this address must not be shadowed and even not be cached.

•System ROM Shadow F000, 64K: Same thing as Video shadow, but according to the system BIOS (main computer BIOS). Enabled recommended for improved performance. System BIOS shadowing and caching should be disabled to run anything but DOS (Windows).

On older BIOS versions the shadow choices are in 400(hex)-byte increments. For instance, instead of one Video ROM Shadow segment of 32K, you will have two 16K segments (C400 and C800). Same thing for Adaptor ROM Shadow segments.

•BootSector Virus Protection: It is not exactly a virus protection. All it does is whenever your boot sector is accessed for writing, it gives a warning to the screen allowing you to disable the access or to continue. Extremely annoying if you use something like OS/2 Boot Manager that needs to write to it. It is completely useless for SCSI or ESDI (Enhanced Small Device Interface) drives as they use their own BIOS on the controller. Disabled recommended. If you want virus protection, use a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) virus detection (Norton, Central Point, etc...). Viruscan by Macfee is also a good idea since it is a shareware.