BIOS and UEFI Setup

Video Description

In this video from ITFreeTraining I will look at how to use the setup software for a BIOS and UEFI computer. The setup is used to configure settings on the computer. This video will explain what these settings do and where you may find them. To get started, I will change to my computer with a BIOS installed and an AMD CPU. Download the PDF handout: http://itfreetraining.com/handouts/ap/1b65.pdf BIOS Demonstration 0:22 You will notice that when this computer starts up, a logo screen is displayed. This may give you some information about the manufacturer and also some information about the BIOS. If the logo screen is disabled, you will be given a text screen instead which will give you some information. At the bottom of the screen, notice that there are a number of different hot keys. These allow access to different things. You will notice on the far right, if the end key is pressed, this will launch the flash software that is used to update the BIOS. Keep in mind that each different BIOS may require a different key to be pressed. Some may not have a key to access the flash software. To access the flash utility, you may need to go into the BIOS setup. Notice to the left of this option is the F12 key for the boot menu. This can vary from BIOS to BIOS. If pressed, this will bring up a boot menu allowing you to decide which device to boot from. This is often useful if you need to perform a one-off boot from an optical drive or USB device. To the left of this, notice the option F9 for “xpress recovery 2”. If this is configured on your computer, this will allow the administrator to restore a computer if the operating system becomes corrupt, lost or damaged. To the left of this, the BIOS setup can be accessed by pressing the delete key. I will press this in a moment, but before that I want to point out to the left of this is the tab key for the post screen. If I press the tab key, notice that the BIOS changes to a text-based screen. With older computers this was always what was displayed, there was no graphic screen. On modern computers, you will see a graphical screen unless it is disabled or you press a key to access the text-based screen. This screen gives us some additional information, such as the type of motherboard, CPU info, amount of memory and storage devices installed. Notice at the bottom of the screen, the keys are still listed which are required to access different options. To access the BIOS setup, I will now press the delete key. Once in the setup, I will be given a text menu. Most BIOS based systems you will find will be text based, you may however find the odd one that is graphically based. I won’t go through every option, just the main ones and those that you may come across when troubleshooting. The top option is “MB Intelligent Tweaker”. If I go into this option, this will display settings that can be configured to fine tune the speed and voltage of the computer. I would recommend leaving this setting on the default. If you’re into overclocking your computer, you may want to change some of these settings, but most users should not have the need to change anything here. The top option, “CPU Clock Ratio” I will select. I am not planning on changing it, but it illustrates how computers operate. You will notice that other than auto, a clock ratio can be selected from five through to eight. The motherboard has a clock on it which I will cover in more detail later in the course. Essentially what happens is the CPU will run a number of times faster than the internal clock. This is called the multiplier. So if the multiplier is set to five, this means the CPU will run five times faster than the motherboard. Unless you have good reason to, you should leave this setting on auto. If I scroll down, the next setting I want to look at is “Set Memory Clock”. This will configure the clock rate the memory will use. In modern computers, the BIOS can read these settings from the memory modules and thus there should be no need to set these settings. Generally, the only time with modern memory that you would change these settings is if you were overclocking the memory modules or you were having stability problems with the memory. You may find that on some of the older motherboards, the memory modules may not be detected correctly. This is usually fixed with a BIOS update, but if you are experiencing problems or have memory modules that are not supported by the motherboard, you may need to manually configure this option. Description to long for YouTube. Please see the following link for the rest of the description. http://itfreetraining.com/ap/1b65 References “CompTIA A+ Certification exam guide. Tenth edition” Pages 316 - 319 Credits Trainer: Austin Mason http://ITFreeTraining.com Voice Talent: HP Lewis http://hplewis.com Quality Assurance: Brett Batson http://www.pbb-proofreading.uk