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The BIOS uses the boot devices set in Nonvolatile BIOS memory , or, in the earliest PCs, DIP switches. The BIOS checks each device in order to see if it is bootable by attempting to load the first sector (boot sector). If the sector cannot be read, the BIOS proceeds to the next device.
On system with BIOS firmware, the BIOS invokes MBR boot code from a hard disk drive at startup. The MBR boot code and the VBR boot code are OS-specific. In Microsoft Windows, the MBR boot code tries to find an active partition (the MBR is only 512 bytes), then executes the VBR boot code of an active partition.
Version 2.0 of the Desktop Management BIOS specification was released on March 6, 1996 by American Megatrends (AMI), Award Software, Dell, Intel, Phoenix Technologies, and SystemSoft Corporation. It introduced 16-bit plug-and-play functions used to access the structures from Windows 95.
The sound card Sound Blaster AWE32 PNP CT3990 had a Plug-and-Play ISA Bus interface chip (large square chip, mid of bottom row).. The term Legacy Plug and Play, [1] also shortened to Legacy PnP, [2] describes a series of specifications and Microsoft Windows features geared towards operating system configuration of devices, and some device IDs are assigned by UEFI Forum. [3]
Windows 7 is the final version of Windows that supports processors without SSE2 or NX (although an update released in 2018 dropped support for non-SSE2 processors). [17] Its successor, Windows 8, requires a processor with SSE2 and NX (for any then-supported architecture). [18]
dmidecode is a free userspace command-line utility for Linux that can parse the SMBIOS data. [2] [3] The name dmidecode is derived from Desktop Management Interface, a related standard with which dmidecode originally interfaced.
The main editions also can take the form of one of the following special editions: N and KN editions The features in the N and KN Editions are the same as their equivalent full versions, but do not include Windows Media Player or other Windows Media-related technologies, such as Windows Media Center and Windows DVD Maker due to limitations set by the European Union and South Korea ...
When a user is logging on to Windows, the startup sound is played, the shell (usually EXPLORER.EXE) is loaded from the [boot] section of the SYSTEM.INI file, and startup items are loaded. In all versions of Windows 9x except ME, it is also possible to load Windows by booting to a DOS prompt and typing "win".