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Award BIOS setup utility on a standard PC. A modern BIOS setup utility has a text user interface (TUI) or graphical user interface (GUI) accessed by pressing a certain key on the keyboard when the PC starts. Usually, the key is advertised for short time during the early startup, for example "Press DEL to enter Setup".
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.
During the POST, the BIOS must integrate multiple competing, changing, and even mutually exclusive standards and initiatives for the matrix of hardware and operating systems the PC is expected to support, although at most only simple memory tests and the setup screen are displayed. The principal duties of the main BIOS during POST include:
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. [7]
AMIBIOS (also written as AMI BIOS) is the IBM PC-compatible BIOS that was formerly developed and sold by American Megatrends since 1986. [10] In 1994, the company claimed that 75% of PC clones used AMIBIOS. [16] It is used on motherboards made by AMI and by other companies. [3] A chip containing an old version AMIBIOS image, pulled from an ECS ...
The original motivation for EFI came during early development of the first Intel–HP Itanium systems in the mid-1990s. BIOS limitations (such as 16-bit real mode, 1 MB addressable memory space, [7] assembly language programming, and PC AT hardware) had become too restrictive for the larger server platforms Itanium was targeting. [8]
Nonvolatile BIOS memory refers to a small memory on PC motherboards that is used to store BIOS settings. It is traditionally called CMOS RAM because it uses a volatile, low-power complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) SRAM (such as the Motorola MC146818 [1] or similar) powered by a small battery when system and standby power is off. [2]
These were Dell's first laptops in the Latitude D-series, and also Dell's first business-oriented notebooks based on the Pentium-M (first-generation "Banias" or Dothan) chips and running on a 400 MT/s FSB on DDR memory. It had a PATA hard drive and a D-series modular bay, and used an ATI Radeon 9000 GPU.