Basic Optimization Tricks

This section is intended for users who have a limited knowledge of BIOS setup to safely alter their settings. It provides a set of fundamental procedures that may help improve the performance of your system. Also, have a look at the important BIOS settings section.

• Make sure that all standard settings correspond to the installed components of your system. For instance, you should verify the date, the time, available memory, hard disks and floppy disks. For more information, go to the Standard CMOS Setup section.
• Make sure that your cache memory (internal and external) is enabled. Of course you must have internal (L1) and external (L2) cache memory present which is always the case for recent systems (less than five years old). For more information, go to the Advanced CMOS Setup section. Recently, some motherboards were found having fake cache memory. Some unscrupulous manufacturers are using solid plastics chips containing no memory to lure vendors and customers and then gain extra profits in an highly competitive semiconductors market. Beware! For more information about this scam (mostly occurring in England), please consult this Web site: http://www.dfw.net/~sdw/bios.html.
• Make sure that your Wait States values are at the minimum possible. You must however be careful because if values are too low, your system may freeze (hang up). For more information (notably, to value to choose depending on your memory speed) go to the Advanced Chipset Setup section.
• Make sure to shadow your Video and System ROM. On older systems, this may improve performance significantly, while on newer it may not make much difference. For more information, go to the Advanced CMOS Setup section.
• Make sure to use a coherent power management strategy. Choosing the right timing may increase the life expectancy of your hard disk. See the Power Management section.
• Hard disk speed is the major bottleneck for a system performance, notably for those with 16 MB of memory and more. You may have the fastest CPU, lots of memory and a confortable cache, but if you have a crummy hard disk, you may not see improvement in performances.