All right, good morning,
good afternoon and good evening, and welcome back to another
episode of ITPRO.TV, I'm your host Don Pezet back again
with CompTIA IT Fundamentas. And in this episode, we're continuing
our adventure with computer hardware. And we're focusing specifically into BIOS,
which is what we left off in in part one. Now, if you didn't watch part one,
it's exciting, it's action-packed, adventure-filled, excitement
around every corner. You definitely wanna check that out. But here in part two, we're focusing
in on one very particular system, which is the BIOS that really
controls what our system does. And here to help us better
understand that is Mr. Ronnie Wong. Ronnie, thanks for joining us. Don, thank you for having me on this
show as we continue to take a look at the idea of the common hardware. And we are diving in that realm of BIOS,
which stands for Basic Input Output System. And so, we wanna make sure that we
understand what it does for us. So we're going to show you
the entire process of where it fits into the boot process as well. And then, we're going to dive into so that we can see some of the different
settings that are in there. That we can maybe,
depending on the system itself, how much you can tweak it or change it
to modify what you actually need to. It's a very important part of every
single computer system that's out there. So it's something that we should be
familiar with as we get started. Now Ronnie,
you threw out a big maybe there, which comes down to something we did
talk about briefly in the last episode, which is every computer has a BIOS, right? That's what's responsible for
putting our computer up. But not every BIOS is created the same, there are different companies
that manufacture them. So what we're gonna show
you on this episode is, it's actually a pretty advanced BIOS,
one that has a ton of features. Yours may have far less, far fewer,
yours might have more, right? It depends on the type
of board that you buy, and the features the vendor
chooses to support. So do be aware, there's variations. But from a general principle, every
computer is going to have this hardware and it all performs a very
important function. So Ronnie,
where should we get started with BIOS? Well when we start to take a look at
where it works, the easiest place for us to get started in the understanding of
BIOS is in the part of the boot process. So we just want to boot up our system so that we can see what actually
happens to our system. And then we'll actually get into
the BIOS and show you what goes on. Right now what I have is
a computer that is turned off. And this is important because
when we start talking about the idea of turning on a computer,
there's a bunch of different processes. You and me, we might have come to expect
we just turn the power button on and what magic it just appears. Okay, we're ready to go. But in the background of
everything that's happening, there's a bunch of different things that
are happening right at the beginning. But it has to make sure that everything
can function the way that it needs to, before it turns the system on or
you might burn out a component or you might actually end
up damaging something. So right away, there are a lot
of different things going on and that's what we want to see. All right so Ronnie, what we can do,
is let's cut over this machine what we are gonna see is the black screen because
well, the computer is turned off right? So I'm gonna push the power button and why
don't you walk and see what's happening. This is the exciting role
that I get to perform, I'm gonna just push
the button on the computer. But a lot of stuff starts happening
beyond just this little button push. All right, so let's go ahead and
full screen this. I know this is kind of weird but
we will see the black screen. So as I'm talking in the background, now
the power button is actually being pushed. What is starting to happen, of course,
is that the power supply itself is now turning on,
everything is beginning to happen, this is where BOS is starting
to take over originally, right? So you're getting it where you're
now seeing the screen that we're, just seeing and it actually gives
us an option to go into BIOS. But it's gone through
a power on self-test and this is where you're getting
to see some of those options. It showed you a hard drive. It showed you some of the options here. And even right here, Don, it shows us it
shows us that we can get into the network adapter, that we can choose
that as a boot option. It is registering all of the different
things that are happening. Now that little circle that we saw, Don, is kind of unusual in today's systems,
to see a bunch of anything anymore. But, at one point, if we were running
a Windows operating system, this is where we would see a big splash screen and
then it would have launched into Windows. But for us, that is the recognition that
the operating system is now loaded and this is what we have running
on this computer, Don. Here is the full operating
system that's running. And so, this process took place very
quickly in comparison to the computers that I had when I was first
growing up with them. All right, so let's talk about
some of the things that we saw there. So first off, if you're not familiar with
it, ASRock is a company that manufactures motherboards, and they manufactured
the motherboard for this system. In part one, we were using one
from a company called ASUS. So there's a number of different
companies that are out there, they all manufacture boards,
typically to the same standard. So it usually doesn't matter
which vendor you get, but some are higher quality than others. So ASRock, they do a pretty good job,
they manufacture this board, that was the first logo that
we saw when the system booted. Then we saw our storage controller. Now your system may or may not have
a separate storage controller. If you have multiple hard drives,
you'll start to see messages about that. And this particular box is actually
a server that we use here in the building. It's got a lot,
how many hard drives does it have, Ronnie? Like eight? Yeah, several. It has a bunch of hard drives. So that's what was all being
listed on that screen there. And then, after that we saw
the network adapter for a moment. In an enterprise enviroment your system
might not boot off of its hard drive, it might boot off of
a network sever somewhere. And so that was the third thing
that we saw before finally seeing that spinning wheel. Now when we see that spinning wheel, Ronnie, that's not the BIOS anymore,
right? So that's where the BIOS hands it over. So once everything is recognized hardware,
the BIOS now says look, I now need an operating
system to boot up and it hands that over to the first
device that it could boot to. And when you see that going it's saying
I found device, now it's looking for that bootable operating system. So that you and I as humans can interact
with the computer and the hardware and do everything that we need to. So ours, because we are running
it as a server, right? An environment in which somebody's
not gonna sit down at this computer on a daily basis and use it. It just gives this command prompt because
what we need to do is we need to set it up and let it run and do what it's
designed to do in the background. If this were one of our desktops,
it would boot to a pretty desktop. We would see a start button and
our application icons and all of that. But servers are purpose built, so this one
boots up and it goes right to this screen. But, you know what, your computer at home,
it runs through this same process. Some computers do a better
job of hiding it then others. So, for example, I have a Mac and when
I turn on my Mac I just immediately see the Apple logo and
then it goes into the operating system. You don't see the BIOS at all. Well, that's because Apple manufactures
the mother board, and the computer, and the BIOS that they use,
and the operating system. Since Apple manufactures all of that,
they can hide it as much as they want. But in the PC world, it may be where
Microsoft makes the operating system, and ASRock makes the mother board,
and Phoenix makes the BIOS. You get all these different
companies involved it becomes more difficult to hide that. It's not a good thing or
a bad thing, it's just a thing. And when you boot your system up,
you may see more or less feedback as a part of that. If there's an error, obviously you'll see a lot of feedback
cuz it's telling you something is wrong. But if there's no errors, it's usually
just a couple of screen clickers that occur and then you boot in your operating
system and that's the end of it. But Ronnie,
I know it's not just as simple as that. BIOS is doing a lot, but there's more screens that we can access
when it comes to dealing with BIOS, right? Right, so when we start dealing
with the idea of BIOS here, there is a lot more that we can get in to. But this goes back to what
we were saying before. It depends on the Operate
not on the operating system, on the actual BIOS is
running on the computer too. So if you can get launched into it, you
may see where you get a lot of settings, you may see where you don't
get a lot of settings. But speaking of that, as you were talking,
it reminded me of something. During that power,
when we first pushed the power button, you might also end up hearing the idea of,
or some of the sound, right? So what you actually end up doing here
is that you end up hearing, well, beeps is what you might hear. Now, not every system will do it, but
those are part of that power on self test where you might hear some
different codes that are going on. And normally it used to be where if you
only heard one beep, that was okay, everything's good. And that power on self test was good and
then it was ready to proceed on. But if all a sudden you
hear a series of them, they all use to mean something
a little bit different. And that would alert you that something
was going wrong at that point. So this is a great reminder for us that every system may be
a little bit different today. Like Don said, if they're hiding it better
you might not hear anything at all, and it just shows you an error right away
because that's easier for people to read. Yeah and if it's a significant error,
like if it's an error with the CPU, or an error with the video card. It can't show you an error at all. So, it has to have some mechanism,
that beep is a great way to do it. But the one that's really hard to
troubleshoot is when it's the power supply that's the problem because
then you can't even turn it on. [LAUGH]
Although, I guess, maybe that one symptom is enough. But, that's all a part of what BIOS
is doing for us is to help make sure that our hardware is healthy to then
turn it over to the operating system. Now, the operating system might be
totally hosed, who knows, right? But at least on the hardware side, everything tested out okay,
enough to be able to boot. There might be some supplemental hardware
that's not working, but CPU, RAM, storage, and network, those are kinda
the three things that get checked. You can boot without network,
you can also boot without storage if you're booting from the network, so
there's a few that can swap out.. But CPU and memory, those have to work. And then your video adapter
needs to work in order for you to be able to see your input and
output. You have it right. Well, now, yeah Don as we start
taking a look at this, right? So, we wanna be able to
get back into that BIOS. But, now that I'm in the operating system,
I can't do it from here. I essentially need to go ahead and
I need to reboot the computer. And from that point, this is where
things get a little bit harder, especially on modern computer systems. Don, at one point we could
reboot the computer. Don could go and get coffee,
come back, and go it's time for me to hit the button
that gets us into BIOS. But Don, today, it's so fast, you almost
have to stare at the screen itself. Have you found yourself where
you missed it a couple of times? Tons of times. For the more eagle eyed viewers out there, you might have noticed during the boot
screen, there was one part at the bottom right where there is
a microscopic text on the screen. Well, if you could read it, it was saying you could press a key
to be able to get into the BIOS. It was only up for,
what do you think Ronnie? Maybe a second, maybe? A full second? Yeah.
So if you hit it in that
right amount of time, you can access the BIOS configuration and
do all sorts of crazy things. But if you miss it, the system boots up,
you've gotta shut down and you've gotta boot back up again. And a lot of times
restarting isn't enough. Right.
The BIOS is typically engaged when you're
coming from a cold boot. A cold boot means the computer is totally
off and you push the power button and it's coming on for the first time. A reboot is what's considered a warm boot,
the hardware is all already turned on. It's just the operating
system is being reset. So on a lot of computers if
you want to access the BIOS, you actually have to shut it all the way
down and then power them back on. So do you wanna show them that Ronnie? Yeah, so I just went ahead and shut
down this particular operating system here and in that menu system that you saw,
it was a number, okay? And if you're listening,
I know how sensitive the microphones are. All of sudden my voice got really loud
by comparison to the noise that was in this room. So the computer has just shut
off manually at this point. So, what we wanna do is we
wanna start that process again, just like we did at
the beginning of the episode. But now we want to enter the BIOS and
we're gonna zoom in on the lower right hand corner of the screen so that we can
see the options that are there, okay? So as we start, so let's go ahead,
Don if you'll go ahead and press the power button for us. And
when Ronnie was talking about the volume, he was talking about
the fans in the system. There's fans that power up
when the system is on and when the fans go quiet it's
always kind of a strange sound. All right, so here we are, okay, and
this is where we have to kind of watch. And when that screen kicks up
you'll see multiple options that are actually available for us. And it's right there, okay, and
I wanna make sure I hit either the F2, or the Delete button, which I just did. And now you're seeing
part of this go through, now as we start to see some
of the additional options. This still looks like it's going through
the boot process, so Don, there's one or two things that may have happened here. You potentially missed the key, right? [LAUGH]
I potentially missed the key, which it looks like I absolutely did. [LAUGH]
So, and that's cuz I was talking
while I was doing. Don, you distracted me. I ruined everything. Well, it happens, right? Especially as fast as systems are and
that's why I wanted to kind of warn us. So, let's try it one more time here,
Don, and see what we can do. All right, while he's doing that,
we'll let him concentrate. And I just wanna mention a few things. You might have noticed where it said you
could Press F2, or Delete to access BIOS, we had two different choices, right? Well, computers can use whatever
key command sequence they want for BIOS access. It's whoever manufactures
the motherboard or the BIOS that picks what that
keystroke command is going to be. Some use F1, some use Shift + F1, or
Ctrl + F1 which are super annoying, some use F10. But by and large, F2 and Delete,
those are the two most common. Ronnie, I'm gonna apply power here. All right. So those are the most common,
F2 and Delete. And if we go full screen, we can catch
it when that message comes up, so it's gonna pop up. I wanna zoom in this time,
we'll focus on hitting it. But when you press those sequences,
then it's gonna take us into BIOS. Now, if you don't know what
keystrokes to hit, right? This one is gonna give us a little message
right there, so we get the message. And Ronnie's just tapping
the key on the keyboard. It doesn't hurt to hit it more than once, you usually don't wanna
hold it down though. And what's gonna happen is, he's gonna
hit that and it's gonna take it in there. Now, if he didn't know what the key was,
then you can pull up a manual for the motherboard, and
it would be in the manual. They would tell you what
that keystroke command was. But if you do it correctly, instead of booting to your operating
system, you'll boot to a screen like this. Right, and this screen is where
we start to see a little bit more modernization, what we've
been talking about, okay? So here you'll notice at the very
top of the screen, there it is, it says ASRock UEFI. Now, Don, this doesn't say BIOS anymore. This says UEFI, and that stands for the universal extensible firmware
interface, if I remember correctly. And this allows us to have a lot more
options available to what you and I could do. In the earliest settings, it wasn't this
graphic, I couldn't use the mouse at all. I had to just use the arrow keys, and, of course, Enter and
different things that you could do to help you scroll through the different
menu options that were available. But overall though,
it does the same thing, but now we have a lot more control and
it's a lot more friendly for somebody to be able to get
access in here to see and do. And UEFI BIOS, popularized itself,
I don't know, maybe six years ago? So most of the computers that you work on
today are going to have UEFI interface, which is usually a very
feature-rich interface. But if you're working on a legacy system. Plenty of people out there that have
computers that are seven years, 10 years old. Those will have the older legacy BIOS and
that's what Ronnie was describing that you're not gonna be
able to use your mouse. [LAUGH]
You're going to have to use the arrow keys, you're going to have
to hit tab to move around and Enter. It's not easy. And on those, there will usually
be a little bar at the bottom that will give you some shortcut keys. It'll tell you things, like press F10 to
save and stuff like that in a legacy. But in the modern UEFI BIOS, which again,
is what we should see most of the time, you've got a mouse. And you can navigate around just
like you normally do on a computer. Now, Ronnie, what are we looking
at here on this first screen, I mean aside from the note about UEFI? Yeah, right at the beginning,
what we're seeing here are just the system classifications that you're actually
seeing for the system itself. So if I take a look in the upper left
hand corner, you'll see, of course, the version of the BIOS that it's showing,
as well as the processor, the speed it's currently running. And all this information is good,
especially if you need to look information up and you want to verify that everything
is actually the way that you want to. And then notice the amount of RAM as
well as the different RAM sticks, and this one you can see is a crucil with
eight gig sticks here, DDR4 at 2400. Now, these sticks, they run at a certain
speed, but on certain ones, right? On certain machines, depending on
the BIOS itself, you might find out that you can kind of tweak this, I guess,
is probably the best word to use. And you can have problems. I used to have a motherboard that
would always mis-detect my memory. I had memory that I believe was,
I think it was 1833 speed, and it would always detect it as 1333. So that means the memory's running at
a slower speed than it should have, and then I would just go into
BiOS Net to update that. But also it's letting us know here,
we've got eight sticks of memory in this computer, and all eight have
been detected and are healthy. If I only saw six,
I would know that I had that were bad. And not only would I know I had two bad, I would know exactly
which slot they were in. So that helps me to know which
ones to pull out and go and replace or maybe to reseat or whatever. So this initial screen just gives us that
quick overview that helps us to make sure everything is being detected properly. And that's really important,
especially when you spend some money in putting together the system
that you actually want. You wanna make sure that
all the RAM shows up, you wanna make sure that the CPU that you
bought, if you built this system itself, is actually the CPU that
the BIOS itself is seeing. Cuz all that's important
during the process that, of everything that we showed you in
the boot, of all the things there, okay? So what we wanna do is we wanna take you
into some of the different menus that you see here. Across the top, you'll see a menu bar, and
we wanna show you some of those options. Now, one of the most important
options as we begin, I'm gonna work from the right-hand
side to the left-hand side. So up here at the top,
you'll see where it says boot, and I'm simply going to click on that boot. And when I do so, that will now expand out
the menu for us a little bit more, and what we're looking for
is what we call the boot priorities, okay? The boot priority allows
me now to pick and choose what order do I want
things to boot in, okay? So here you'll see boot options one,
two, and three. We're not gonna get super deep into it,
but if I just click on one of these, you'll see that in the first option I can
choose any one of these devices here. So you'll notice this menu, it shows
the hard drives that are available for me if I wanted to go in and
boot from this hard drive. Or I can use the Windows boot manager,
if I'm running Windows, that's probably the one that I want. Or I can even use that network adapter
that Don was talking about to be my first choice. So I can arrange them
the way that I want to. And it just depends on
what your company or what system actually needs to get set up. From that point, once you select one, that
will change the option right here, and then you can pick another one. And the idea of picking more
than one boot option is, well, they're a fail over
a lot of the times, right? If the first one doesn't work, well,
what do you want to go to next, okay? And that way you know that you can always
have something that will allow you to boot the computer up. And that's what you want to be able to do. So these boot options are very important. If you set them where you set up one where
there's not an operating system it can boot to, well, hopefully what will happen
is your second option will come in, and then possibly even your third
option if you need to as well. But these are by far the most important in
terms of the boot priorities that we see. Yeah, and a lot of times we don't
need to mess with these because, and we didn't see it earlier, but that little
note that was at the bottom right corner of the screen that said press F2 or
Delete to get in the BIOS. Some of them would say press
F12 to go into the boot menu. And so we can override that one time. But in here, it's really handy to come in
if you wanna make that change permanent, especially if you have multiple
hard drives, like this server does, which one do I wanna boot from? Or if you have a CD drive, maybe you always wanna boot from that CD
drive first, so you can manipulate it. This is a pretty standard change for a lot of people when they
initially set up a computer. Not so much on laptops because laptops
don't normally have extra store, you only have one boot choice, but
on desktops this is a pretty common thing. But it doesn't stop there. I guess for a lot of people
it probably does stop there, that's the only thing
you'd come in here and configure, but
there's other options on here. Things like, I can see the boot
beep that you mentioned earlier for the diagnostic side. Those are all things that we might
choose to configure as well, right? Yes, so if you go, look, I really
want those beeps so I can hear that instead of me having to watch the screen
and know that something's going on. I can go ahead and I can configure this
by simply selecting that option here, boot beep. And then in the little menu, I can select
enabled, and now it changes for us. Now, this is important, the change that
we're seeing right here is gonna be held right here until we exit the system, so
it's not gonna take place immediately. But when we decide that we're done with
the BIOS is at that point where we'll either decide to keep it or we won't, and we'll show you what that
option when we get through. But you'll see that there's actually
even more if I scroll down. There's a bunch of different
other options down here, logos, and boot failure, some additional things. But most of the time, on every system at
least, you at least see at the top here, okay, those boot options is
what you end up seeing, and that's the part where you'll do that. So a lot of options that are available. Now, some of the things that you can
consider configuring here all will kinda depend on usage, right? So we mentioned how we only had a brief
window of time to be able to press F2 or Delete, right? Well, we've got a setup prompt time
right there that's set to one second. We could bump that up, right? And in fact,
I should have done that before the show, that would have been smart. Make it three seconds, or something. It's gonna slow down the time
it takes your computer to boot. On a server,
I'm not really worried about that. On a laptop,
that might be kind of annoying, right? The boot beep, maybe that annoys you,
you can leave it be. But the full-screen logo,
when this system boots up, it displays a full-screen ASRock logo. Well, that logo is hiding
some of the things that are going on behind the scenes. So if you wanna really
learn about computers and see some of that stuff,
you can turn off that logo. And now when the system boots up, you'll
actually see other output on the screen. And depending on your motherboard,
you may see a lot of stuff, you may not, it just kind of depends. So that's a great way to change
that boot experience and be able to see a little more. You might also see, and actually, did you all ready say that
the power on, like if you lose power? No, not yet. Okay, a lot of option in here, and
usually under the boot stream where it says, if you lose power,
when power comes back on, what do you do? Do you boot back up or
do you stay powered off? And that's kinda nice cuz we
have a computer, like a server, you want always on, you want it to boot
back up the moment it gets more power. So a lot of crazy stuff in it
that can be configured and kinda change the way
that that system boots. Yeah, it's really amazing about
all the settings that you can change. This is before the operating system
ever gets loaded into RAM and that we can use it. So these options, make sure that you take
a look at them as you start to study a little bit more, that at least
help you to get things set up. Now, along with this, of course, we're gonna go to the second menu to the
left of the boot, where it says security, and we just wanna talk about
a couple of different options here. And I wanna warn people
about this option as well. So let's go ahead and
click on security, and then you'll notice that there's
a supervisor password and there's a user password, all this
stuff actually seems great, right? The more secure you want your system,
you go, hey, this is a great option, I wanna go ahead and
set up this idea of these passwords. And that way no body can
change the options except for the person that has the password
here that we've been talking about. Now, Don, that sounds like a great idea. I think that that's 100% the way
that I should go a lot of times. Until I realized something, Don, that I
don't actually boot into BIOS very often. And all of a sudden now six months later, I need to change something on that boot
option, I can't remember the password. Now Don,
how easy is it to get this password? It's usually pretty annoying. [LAUGH]
If you forget the password, there's nobody you can call
to give you the password. Right, but typically,
they'll have some way to reset it. Usually it involves
opening up the computer. There might be a button on
the motherboard that you hold down or even a little jumper you have to use
to create a contact between two pins. It's not easy,
i t's not intended to be easy, right? Because when you set a password, you're trying to stop people from
getting into BIOS and making changes. If it was easy to reset that password,
they would be able to get in there and make changes. So when computers are deployed in schools,
universities, hospitals, they normally put little locks on the cases to prevent
the cases from being opened. Which prevents people from getting
to the BIOS reset options. So that's why they usually make it
a physical button on the board. It's difficult, but hopefully you
don't forget what your password is, that's a key thing. Yeah, but I have, and I've actually
supported someone that said no, I have a password on here. And I said, what's the password, and
they're like, I don't know, try this, and about 50 passwords later,
we still didn't get it. So this can be one of those very
annoying options that are available. But if you do need it for the systems,
just like what Don was talking about, here's the option that you can go ahead
and set and get this ready to go as well. Okay, now, Don, among those features which
are great for settings that we have, okay, we can also see of course, well,
there's a hardware monitor. Now I wanna get to this because I think
this is where some of the neat stuff really is. Because of new systems, we can monitor
just about anything that we want to. So let me see if I can show you some
of the options that are available. So for example,
the motherboard temperature right now, well it's 31 degrees Celsius. I don't know my conversion in my head,
but it's a little bit warm. Okay, it's fairly hot when
you start seeing it, and the same thing with the CPU temperatures. But notice that that means that there's
a lot of different sensors on this board as well. And that way, you can see whether or
not you're starting to experience some type of hardware failure
that might be going on. Notice you're also seeing
voltages that are here. Now, this is not so much you can
change a lot of this, right, but what you can do is at least be able to
know that your system is monitoring it. So that you can now go in and
you can also see this too, and this one has where you
can tune the fans right here. Select a fan mode, you can customize and
set five CPU temperatures, and assign the respective fan speed, Don. So I can choose how I want the fan
speeds to be at all times. Whatever I might wanna undo, you name it, there's just a lot of
unique settings in here. And with a lot of these things,
we have to be careful with, right? Because if we, for example,
if your fans are noisy, and the fans in this are fairly noisy. If this sat by my desk,
it would bother me, right? So you might choose to slow the fans down,
but that means your computer's
gonna get warmer. Now, we look at that CPU temperature
up there, the motherboard, it was 31 degrees Celsius. Well, 31 Celsius is hot, but it's actually
within the tolerances of the motherboard. If you look at the manual for your
motherboard, for your network hard drive, they all have operating temperatures. And that temperature range
can actually be pretty big. Sometimes they can go as high as, in the
Fahrenheit world, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. And you look at it and you're like,
200 degrees, that's crazy, but It's within the operating temperature for
that particular thing. Other things can't operate that hot, and
they need fans or heat sinks or whatever. So being able to see all
that here is really nice. You can also leverage software utilities
to see this once your computer is booted. So the BIOS isn't the only
place where you can see this. Yeah, but
I just like this cuz it shows, sometimes you'll actually see the voltage
changes and the temperature spikes and different things as your system
is actually running, too. Okay, the next menu over is the tool,
and as we start seeing it now, this is where it gets a little
bit more technical, right? So inside of here,
you can update the actual BIOS itself, it shows you all those options. Even do things like the secure backup
as well as the configuration for your network adapter. But Don, what I actually like
in here is a system browser. So if I wanted to focus in on this system,
I can click on this, at least there we go, okay? And now notice that I can
actually see certain options, and it even tell tells me what is here. So this is PCI3, if we can zoom in, let me see if I can zoom in on the options
right here toward, yeah, there we go. So as I zoom in on this, you can see
where it actually shows me that option. And then I can see what each one of these
devices are as we start going through and actually pull,
just like what Don was talking about. Now, underneath here, on the bottom, if we
scroll down just a little bit more towards the bottom,
now let me hover over one of these. Nodes it even shows you the profile, so the idea of a profile is
a manual setting that we have, whereas the other one at that top here
is the kind of automatic setting. Even the CPU, all of the information
displayed right here, if I'm not really certain about
the system itself internally, I have this that helps guide me. And Ronnie, if you flip back over
one of those memory sticks again, you'll see one of the things that
I mentioned just coincidentally. Right now, the memory we have
in there is DDR 2400, right, but look at the XMP profile
that's listed there. It's got a profile for 2666, which we
may or may not be able to support. It's also got 1333, and notice how
there's the double speed, right. 1333 doubled is 2666, but you see where it could potentially
detect this memory wrong. Maybe we don't have 2400,
maybe we actually do have 2666, and we're not taking advantage of it. So you may need to get in and override those, but be careful,
you can push hardware beyond its limits. Now, this motherboard is actually
a very fancy motherboard. A lot of them don't have a cool graphic
like what we're showing you right now, so if you don't see this in yours,
don't be upset, this board is deigned for full tuning. So it actually has a whole separate screen
for what's called overclocking, all right? Over clocking or OC, let me get
this back to our main screen here. If you look,
there's an OC tweaker tab up there. And inside of that OC tweaker, you can actually make your processor
run faster than it's intended to run. You can make your memory run
faster than it's intended to run. When you do that, you get extra
performance out of your system. And the trade off is,
it usually runs hotter, which shortens the life of the equipment,
and it can potentially lead to errors. You can have crashes if
you push it too far. So overclocking is something that
most people don't want to do. In an enterprise or
a production environment, overclocking is generally bad. For video gamers, a lot of times,
they'll push the system to try and get the best performance out of it. But it does shorten the overall
life span of the equipment. So we've always gotta keep that in mind,
those are really advanced features beyond what most people
are gonna have to work with. Yeah, so Don, I just really wanna
make sure that we got in here, and at least we're able to see some of these
basic features that we'll find in BIOS. Now remember that we kind of
give this overall idea, right, that this is a very fancy board. And if you try and do this on your own
computer, and all of a sudden you're only getting this screen that's allowing you to
just use your keyboard to navigate around. It's doing the basic same
things in the background. You just don't have that option to
control every feature, whereas this one, you do have that option to do so. So make sure you take a look at it as you
start to work on different systems that are out there. Cuz this is kind of the foundation,
right, making sure your motherboard and everything else is working the way
that we expect it to work. This can be find right here in the BIOS. All right now, I know we're low on
time, but I've got one last question for you, Ronnie,
because I've done this myself. When we get into BIOS and
we start making changes, and we get things set
exactly the way we want. If we just push the power button
on my computer, we'll be up for a rude awakening cuz it
doesn't save what we do. So what does that process look like,
to save our settings and make sure they stay in effect? So remember that, exactly like Don
said, if you just turn this thing off, all of the settings that we made in terms of
changes are not gonna take effect at all. So what you wanna do is, we wanna go and
gracefully exit this system. And up here in the upper right-hand
corner, you'll see where it says Exit. And now you'll see the different options. Save changes and exit, if you do this,
it's gonna save all the changes. It's gonna exit the BIOS and
continue on with the boot process. You can discard the changes and
exit, and if you do that, once again, it's the same thing. Except it's not gonna save the changes and still continue on with
the boot process itself. But let's say that you go, hey, look,
I really wanna stay in here, okay, but I don't wanna keep any
of the changes I made. Cuz you might not remember, what if you
think, I don't know if I set that or not. Make sure that you're still
looking around, go ahead and also discard those changes, too. That way you can make sure, but
if you haven't touched the board at all, it gives you the option to
go back to factory default, essentially load the basic or
the default UEFI settings. It gives you all those options
right there that are available. And it's something that you might want
to make sure that if you're gonna make changes and you need them saved, make sure that you always exit
the way that you want to. And then you select the one that you want,
and then at that point, I'm gonna discard the changes because this is actually
a system that we use on our set here. So I'm gonna discard the changes and
exit setup. From that point,
what should happen, of course, notice the boot process begins again. Everything should come up and start over. And as we do so, as long as I
don't press the F2 or Delete key, everything should be fine. And that will continue in the regular
boot process that we want, and get all the way into the operating system. All right, well, Ronnie, I think that
was a pretty good run-through on PC BIOS and what that's gonna look like on
most systems that are out there. It is a fun, kinda neat, almost like
operating system hidden inside of your computer that most people
haven't taken a look at. So if you're ever bored,
check it out on your own computer, you can see a lot of stuff in there. Do be careful when you're
changing settings. Ronnie, thank you for
walking us through that. And for you, the viewers out there,
thank you for watching. But that's the end of this episode,
so we're gonna wrap it up here. Signing off for ITProTV, I'm Don Pezet. And I'm Ronnie Wong. And we'll see you next time. [MUSIC] Thank you for watching ITProTV.
