PC BIOS Settings

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers calm this time I'm going to talk about PC BIOS settings the BIOS is the software stored on a chip on our computers and motherboard that runs before the operating system boots up today there are also two types of BIOS in common use legacy and UE F I and so before we look at some common BIOS settings I thought I'd explain the differences between the two all computers need a BIOS or basic input/output system that runs when they are first turned on and which initializes their Hardware so he can loaded operating system such as Windows for over 20 years all pcs also came with BIOS software called BIOS however since 2005 bio started to be replaced with a UEFI or unified extensible firmware interface UEFI also has many advantages over BIOS including a graphical interface and the ability to access drives greater than 2 terabytes in capacity technically uef eye is an interface specification that in effect replaces the original PC BIOS however in practice UAF eye is often listed as a BIOS type which is reasonable as UEFI provides basic input/output system functionality gigabyte also specify their motherboard as having a ufi BIOS while Super Micro described a BIOS type as M motherboard as UPF I a soos mr. UEFI BIOS here one from ami and MSI still just used a term BIOS in this video on zeth we're going to talk about pcs having either a legacy BIOS or UEFI BIOS as these are the labels used by most companies today there are many different legacy and UEFI BIOS is in use all with their own different user interface in this video I therefore can't show you exactly how to make changes in your particular BIOS however I can explain some of the common settings available and demonstrate what they look like on a range of different computers to enter a PC's BIOS we need to press the appropriate key when it's first booted up this is typically the delete key the f2 key or the Escape key and is usually briefly indicated on the screen during the boot process for example here we have a freeze-frame of what we see when yi7 desktop PC is turned on with the delete key being used to enter its BIOS so if I boot up the PC and press Delete we end up in its BIOS settings what we have before us here is a pretty modern UEFI BIOS which we can either operate using a mouse you can see we've got a pointer on the screen there for that or we can operate it using the cursor keys so I take the cursor to go down to it go into one of the setting screens here and to get into it escape to come back again or I could use the cursor keys to move across the tabs at the top of the interface to get to all the different settings and you'll see the the final tablet interface here is save and exit and there are two options at the top there one is to a save and exit setup which would exit keeping our changes but there's also an option below that to a exit without saving and indeed in most BIOS is if you press the Escape key you'll get to exit without saving and I put that out to make it clear if you want have a look around in your PC's BIOS you can do so perfectly safely providing at the end you exit without saving which is exactly what I'm going to do now so we can take a look at another BIOS so here we are in a second sample BIOS which is the BIOS on Maya soos laptop which I've accessed using the Escape key and this is again at UEFI BIOS but it looks very different to what we're just looking at because this is running its default easy mode it's e-zine mode but if I press the f7 here it'll take us to the advanced mode which looks very similar to what we were just looking at again we've got a tabbed interface not quite as many options here because it's the BIOS on the laptop they don't tend to be quite as sophisticated but we can flick through a range of options and again we've got save and exit and again I will discard changes and exit so we can look at a third files now moving from the new to the old here we are about to enter a legacy files and I thought it was very important to cover legacy biases in this video because although modern motherboards don't come with a legacy BIOS there are hundreds of millions of computers out there in the world with a legacy BIOS and they're going to be around for a very long time and as you can see a legacy BIOS is text-based it has to be worked with a keyboard you can't work one of these with a mouse but the same principles apply we can go down to an option highlighted say they the power management setup and so on that we can work the options there also if we wish and we can use escapes to get back to the previous menu in any bias I've ever used escape to get back to a previous menu always works and again here we've got options to either save it exit says have we made any changes or to exit without saving and so again here I'll exit without saving finally here we are in the bios of the Rison PC I recently built on this channel very graphical UEFI system with a great mouse control you often haven't got very good mouse control in UEFI BIOS but here it's it's very very good unlike the BIOS we saw am a laptop you can run this neither an advanced mode with a tabbed interface like this or you can run it in a nice easy mode where everything's on the screen at once so there we are we've had a look at four different BIOS sisters to give you a feel of what they look like the sort of interface you get so let's now look at some of the settings you might want to change in your PC's BIOS a common reason to change PC BIOS settings is to determine how a PC will boot and the boot options can be in all kinds of different places in different biases so for example here in this legacy BIOS there isn't an obvious boot menu but if we go down to the advanced BIOS features there are two options here which actually allow us to change how the PC opened up and first for example here we have what's called here the hard disk boot priority if we press enter on that you can see there's two drives here which is counting as a hard drive one in fact is an SSD the other is a hard drive it's currently set to boot from the the samsung SSD I'll just press the escape to get back the previous screen but then we've also here got the option to set to the first second and third boot devices and as you can see this PC is set to it the first boot device is going to be a USB device here identified as a USB hard drive and in fact it could be any USB device the second boot device is then a cd-rom which also means a DVD ROM and the third is the hard disk which is actually one of the two drives we previously selected in the previous menu so this is a fairly common setup it at a legacy BIOS we've got the PCs has a little boot from its hard drive or SSD unless it first of all finds a USB Drive or a cd-rom or DVD if we transition to look at the UEFI BIOS on my seuss laptop you can see that in the easy mode top right there was a boot priority list this machine has an SSD on which Windows is installed and I've also plugged in the USB Drive before it booted it up which has got linux mint on it and as you can see like mosha afire biases it tries to tell you what you would be booting so at the top it doesn't just say the SSD which is a microphone 1100 it actually tells you go to the Windows boot manager and we could change the order of these up here this said we go into the advanced mode by pressing f7 here you'll see we have got a boot menu in this system for your across there you'll see the boot options I could go down or come back to the keyboard we could change the first option to be the coarser USB Drive and that windows will become second this said if we now rebooted this machine saving these changes it wouldn't boot for me speed drive and the reason for that is because of something called secure boot and if we go across into the security menu I can show you that and it's not immediately on screen we have to then scroll down keep going down and eventually the bottom of here we can find it there we are and if we select the secure boot option you see we've got a setting to enable or disable secure but now this matters because secure boot is a feature it came in with Windows 8 and basically when secure boot is enabled it prevents any operating system booting other than Windows 8 or 8.1 or a Windows 10 so if you want to boot up from for example a USB Drive with linux mint on it we have to disable secure boot because it isn't Windows 8 or Windows 10 and similarly if you want to install say windows 7 from a USB Drive you'll have to disable secure boot it's also worth noting that secure boot isn't always called secure boot on all systems so for example if we transition to this UEFI BIOS we go across to BIOS features and we discover at the top we've got our boot option priorities here between a Saudi DVD Drive and an SSD but if we keep going down we find an option called Windows 8 10 features this is a secure boot option on this system and if we select that you can see we can either select Windows 8 10 or other operating system and here we have to select other operating system if we want to boot anything other than Windows 8 or Windows 10 if your PC is fitted with high performance ddr4 Ram an important BIOS setting is the one to enable XMP or extreme memory profiles this only exists in recent UEFI bios's and is usually found on the front screen in easy mode as we can see here or if we go into a classic mode or traditional mode you'll find it under something like advanced memory settings so if we click on that you'll see here we've got the extreme memory profile setting here which is currently disabled and this means that ddr4 memory modules will be limited to a clock speed of 2 133 megahertz even if they rated faster than this however if we enable XMP by selecting a profile 1 this will cause the motherboard to read an extended memory profile from the RAM and roll it at it intended speed which here is at 2400 Meadows now as with all BIOS changes we have to save at exit to make this happen so we'll go to a save and exit and a save and exit setup and yes we want to do that and with the board having come back again it'll say oh you're back in her advanced memory settings there we are lock on memories now running at two thousand four hundred megahertz which in fact we could check again also an easy mode there we are the memories running at the right speed so if you have got ddr4 ram in your system which was rated at more than two thousand 133 megahertz do make sure you enable XMP profiles all biases can monitor and potentially control the temperature of the CPU and other PC components so for example in this legacy BIOS I can go down to a PC health status and select that and we can now see here the temperature of the CPU and the current system temperature which is another temperature sensor on the motherboard and if we want to we can also set some alarm so if I go down to a CPU warning temperature currently disabled I could select that and tell this PC but if it hits a 70 degrees C for its CPU temperature it will sound and along now that alarm will be made by a speaker connected to your motherboard so if you haven't got a motherboard speaker connected or other form of motherboard sounder connected you won't hear this alarm but if you have got one and the temperature alarm is triggered you'll hear a sound a bit like this which will tell you your pc b--'s overheating and you can also see here we've got the opportunity to set alarms for example fan failure if the fan stops spinning it will actually indicate that as well and we've also here got what's called smart fan control which when it's enabled means that the PC is controlling the CPU fan speed based on the CPU temperature now if we transition to looking to more modern UEFI BIOS your farm we've got all kinds of settings for temperature monitoring and fan control and here they're all in one screen called a smart fan so if we go to that here we are look all kinds of stuff we can adjust here as previously I've set a temperature warning for the CPU which I could also set warnings for the system temperature the chipset temperature and the temperature and the voltage regulators on the motherboard over here we can control fans and we first of all switch family want to control the CPU fan or what are potentially two connected system fans and then we can actually pick up a profile based upon the graph here which shows us how fast the fan will go between different temperature of Norton a 100 degrees C I hope our peace he never gets to a hundred degrees C so for example we could select a normal as the default of course we could have silent which will run the fan a bit slower as you can see up here we could have manual where we could adjust these points ourselves to exactly where we want to put them have a lots of it latitude in that we've also got to full speed if I feel like that the fun will go to maximum we'll probably hear it coming up I can certainly hear that in the background let's put it back to back to normal and we can also here decide which temperature Center we use to control each fan so for example the CPU if the fan is being controlled by receiver you temperature but that's an obvious thing to do but we might for example one of control say that the back found on the PC that system found one here also based upon the CPUs sensor because the CPU is gonna be the hottest thing in the PC I often find that's the best thing to use to control many of the fans so if you're using a PC for gaming or for lots of say video editing or or rendering you may well want to experiment significantly with a stream like this to make sure your PC is operating at an optimal temperature by making appropriate settings for your fans now here I am booting up my laptop and pressing the Escape key to get into the BIOS but as you can see we don't get straight to the BIOS instead it asks for a password and in a buyers you can set up various levels of password and I wanted to show you that so first of all they've also got to enter a password here and we'll just press enter and it'll now give the option of going into the boot menu or we could enter setup into the BIOS and here we are in the BIOS in its easy ed mode and you will see if we go down here we've got a option to set an administrator password or a user password and to show you exactly what those are it's probably easy to go into the Advanced Mode here so I press the f7 to get into that and we go across here you'll see them a security section we've got the section on password e with some very helpful text at the top that tells us what were different types of passwords are and I would point out the names given to different passwords in BIOS is do change on different systems but in general what you see here is what you'll see most bios's which is you can have an administrator password which is a password to prevent entry to the BIOS itself so if hire first enter here I could actually set a book a new administrator password or else we've got one at the moment so I'll escape out of that or I could set a user password and a user password protects the whole computer so if you had a user password in the BIOS then every time you turn the machine on every time you boot up you'll have to enter that password before you can do anything now my personal advice is you really should set an administrator password password to protect the BIOS itself on any mobile device like a laptop and the reason for this is there's no point having your laptop incredibly secure if all someone's got to do to get into it is to go into the BIOS turn off things like secure boot allow themselves to boot them to a USB Drive with a Linux image on it and then they could access any other drives on your system that are not encrypted so it's a very good idea to have an administrator password set on a mobile device having a user password set can also be useful it can make your machine a lot more secure unless people know your bios password and not could be able to use your machine at all having said that do be aware that BIOS passwords will be removed if your BIOS is Reese set and that on a desktop PC someone could achieve this by opening up the case and removing the battery on the motherboard that maintains the BIOS settings some people find the idea of making BIOS changes to be a daunting prospect and indeed there are settings such as those for memory timings or memory voltages but you really shouldn't touch unless you're very certain what you're doing this said there were also other settings such as the one here the changing the color of LED lighting that were both obvious and safe to experiment with you also always have the option to exit without saving and if you get into a real mess you can reset to default if necessary by removing the battery on the desktop PCs motherboard hopefully what I've covered in this video has helped to demystify the BIOS and given you an introduction to making BIOS setting changes but now that's it for another video have enjoyed you seen here Chris best act like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 1,053,030

Keywords: BIOS, UEFI, BIOS UEFI, UEFI BIOS, legacy BIOS, BIOS settings, UEFI settings, BIOS vs UEFI, XMP, XMP Profile, XMP profile BIOS, XMP BIOS, fan control, PC fan control, BIOS fan control, BIOS password, BIOS user password, BIOS admin password, boot options, secure boot, BIOS boot options, BIOS secure boot, UEFI secure boot, disable secure boot, secure boot settings, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, BIOS temperature control, enter BIOS, enter UEFI, entering the BIOS, BIOS key

Id: ezubjTO7rRI

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2019