Sandra Prior

What is the BIOS?

Sometimes the BIOS talks to us, late at night, when we’re all alone – we listen.

Now’s the time we can get all the ladies in the house worked up as we're going to talk about the BIOS. There's nothing more likely to cause a stampede at party than the promise of some hot BIOS chatter. The BIOS is the firmware for the motherboard - it bootstraps the system and these days hands control of the hardware to the OS. In practice, if you ran DOS, the BIOS would still be in control of the hardware.

The BIOS is still an important area despite this relegation. For hardcore overclockers, it is still the primary way to tweak more speed and voltage out of the memory, buses and processor. GUI-driven Windows applications are fine for casual tinkering and reporting, but the coal face is still a deep blue BIOS screen. Going somewhat in hand with this are the BIOS recovery tools that motherboards ship with. Thankfully these days all should offer a base recovery mode that can enable you to recover a BIOS from an image stored on a floppy or CD at boot time. The next step up from this are dual - and quad-BIOS features that store multiple BIOS images.

If you're wondering why all the BIOS in the world are blue - and frankly, rubbish to work with - it's because just a small handful of companies own the rights to the patents which have to be licensed by motherboard manufacturers. There have been moves by companies to start afresh here, but none have managed it yet. There's still hope though - Intel has its Extensible Firmware Interface, while Google, Gigabye and MSI are supporting the OpenBIOS project in various devices.

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