Instructor: In this lesson, I'm going to show you
how you can configure the BIOS
if you're using it in one of your systems
For this demonstration, I'm going to be using
a ThinkStation P410 BIOS to show you how this works,
but most BIOS are going to operate pretty much the same way.
You just may see more or less options
depending on your specific motherboard
and your particular computer.
Our first option that we're presented with
is what language we want to use.
Now, in this particular system,
they do support both English and French,
and I'm going to use English because that's what I speak.
Under that we have our System Summary.
If you select System Summary,
you'll arrow down and then hit enter.
It will tell you a little bit about this particular system.
Now this is a server system,
it's using an Intel Xenon processor.
It operates at 2.6 gigahertz.
We can see that it has four cores.
So this is a multi-core CPU.
And then in terms of memory,
you can see we have about 132 two gigabytes installed,
or 131072 megabytes.
When we look at the bus speed,
this memory is operating at 2133 megahertz.
And as we keep moving down,
you can see what is enabled or disabled
and what's operating on this particular system.
As we go down to the drives,
you'll see there are two SATA drives.
One is a hard disk drive for our operating system
and one is a CD/DVD that we can use
to install software and other things
using that optical drive.
If I want to go back to the main menu, I'll simply hit escape.
Next, we can go down and we can set
our date and time of the system.
On this particular system, you can see
it is just after six o'clock at night
on the 16th of July, 2022 as I'm filming this video.
Next, we're going to go here and you can see
that we have a setup mode
and we can set this as either text or graphic.
Some BIOSes will support a minimal graphical display.
I'm going to keep it in text for our purposes here
and then Setup Content is either Basic or Advanced
and we'll keep it Basic
so we have less settings to look through.
As you look through the bottom there,
you can also see some other summary data
such as the type of system it is.
If it has a Mac address for its ethernet or network card.
It's system ID and other key information like that.
Next, we're going to go enter the devices
and to do that, we're just going to hit the right arrow key,
which will move over to the Device tab.
And from here, we can configure
all sorts of different things for this system,
including audio, video, network, USB,
SATA and Thunderbolt connections.
We're not going to go through every single sub menu option,
because that would take us hours.
But instead, I want to point out
a couple of highlights to you.
And the one I really want to cover
is the USB Configuration tab.
Now, the reason for this is I mentioned
that your BIOS and UEFI can be configured
to enable or disable USB devices.
So, if I was worried about malware going into my system
or data going out of my system,
I can actually arrow down to this,
hit enter and then disable that.
By doing this, this has now disabled
all the USB ports on this particular system.
Now, if I'm using a USB keyboard or a mic or a webcam,
all of those will no longer work.
And so, I probably don't want to configure it like this
even though this is the most secure.
So, I'm going to go ahead and enable those USB ports again.
And instead, we're going to cycle down
all the way down here where it says
USB Mass Storage Driver Support.
Now in this case, I can go and select Disabled here.
And when I do this, it means if I take a USB thumb drive
or an external hard drive
and plug it into one of my USB ports,
the operating system is not going to be able
to read and write data from it.
But if I plug something in like a keyboard or a mouse,
those are not considered mass storage devices
and they will still operate.
And so, this is a very secure way of setting up the system
by enabling all USB devices,
but then restricting or disabling
mass storage driver support if your BIOS supports that.
We're going to go ahead and hit Exit to go back.
And now, we're going to go over to the Advanced tab.
Under the Advanced tab, you're going to find
lots of different options,
but the one I want to focus on here
is going to be our ACPI Settings.
Now, this is our power settings
and this is where you're going to enable things
like hibernation or sleep status
from the BIOS to your operating system.
For example, if you allow hibernation,
this will allow the computer not just to sleep,
but to actually create a save state of the computer.
And that way, if you're using a laptop
and you close the lid, it will save your state
and when you open the lid and go back to the computer
it'll be exactly where you left it.
Hibernation is what allows that to happen.
Now, if you don't want that setting,
you could go in here and you could simply disable it.
Now, in addition to that, we also have ACPI Sleep State.
Now, when you look at the ACPI Sleep State,
this configures what the button
on the front of your computer is going to do when you push it.
Now, if you push it and it has the S3 (Suspend to RAM)
that means it's going to save your state into RAM
and keep power to the machine.
But if you want to Suspend Disabled, that will prevent you
from being able to suspend that system.
This is another thing you can enable or disable
depending on your particular system preferences.
If we go back, we're going to look at a couple more under here
including our CPU Configuration.
Now, our CPU Configuration on this particular motherboard
does have multiple sockets.
So, this motherboard will support me
putting in one or two processors.
And here you can see those labeled
as Socket 0 and Socket 1.
I can then go in and I can configure
on a Per-Socket Configuration.
What I want to do for each of those sockets
such as enabling or disabling the cores for those.
Then, if we go a little further down,
you'll see the next option we have is hyper Threading.
Hyper Threading allows us to get
better performance out of our processor by allowing
software to use multiple logical processor threads
inside of a single physical processor.
Right now, this is set to enable,
but if you had a particular software or use case
that didn't support it,
you could go in and you could disable that if needed.
Next, we're going to go back
and we're going to look at the Memory Configuration.
Now under Memory Configuration,
you're going to see a couple of unique things on this BIOS
that you probably won't see on your own system at home,
including support for ECC or error correcting code.
You could see on this particular BIOS we have it configured
and this motherboard supports auto sensing of ECC.
Now, in addition to that, you could disable ECC
or you can enable ECC, depending on your needs,
but for ours we're going to leave it in Auto.
And this means I can put ECC memory into this mother board
or regular non-parity memory into this board
and it will be able to detect and support either one.
In addition to that, we also can support
two different types of memory on this board,
UDIMM and RDIMM.
Now, UDIMM is that unbuffered, non-parity,
normal type of memory,
where RDIMM is registered memory,
which is going to be able to support ECC.
Because we have this set up this way,
I could use either one on this motherboard
and it will support it just fine.
But if I put in something like a UDIMM module
and it didn't work,
I could go in and select this as UDIMM only
and that would overwrite that setting
and tell it I am using UDIMM
you must also recognize it as such.
So that's another way to be able to use the BIOS
when you're troubleshooting issues.
Now, if I keep going down, you're going to see Memory Map.
And this is where we can configure multi-channel memory
on this particular motherboard.
This will allow us to do Channel Interleaving.
And right now it is set to Auto.
So based on where I put the modules on my motherboard,
the motherboard will automatically detect that
and then set it up for single, dual,
triple or quad channel memory,
depending on the configuration.
Or I can go in here and actually manually set that up
if I was doing some sort of a troubleshooting
and say that I want single channel,
dual channel, triple channel or quad channel.
For example, maybe there's some use case
where I only want to operate in single channel.
So I would say one way, and that way,
even if I put in two modules or four modules,
it will still operate only with a 64 bit address
using single channel as my method.
If I go back here, we're going to go back again.
And now we're on the main screen,
we're going to go over to Power.
Underneath Power, you're going to notice
that we have our fan settings
and here right now I have it set to 1,
which is the lower fan speed.
This means it'll be as quiet as possible,
but this does risk higher temperatures in my system.
Now conversely, if I was overclocking my processor
I might want to move down to the higher fan setting,
which would be called a cool mode,
which is going to have a higher fan speed
and lower temperatures in the system.
If I wanted a balance mode,
that would be something more like 4,
which is right in the middle.
It's going to be a good balance
between temperature and fan speed and noise.
And by doing that, I'm getting the best of all worlds.
Next, we're going to go over to Security.
And here we have a couple of different
security options that we can set,
including our Administrator Password
and our Power-on Password.
When you're dealing with the Administrator Password
this is going to prevent anyone
from accessing these BIOS settings
and changing things on us.
So we do want to make sure we have
an administrator password
to lock other people out of the BIOS
so they can't make configuration changes
without our approval.
On the other hand, the power-on password
is going to be the password
that controls access to the entire system.
If I set up power-on password and you turn on the computer,
you have to enter that password
before it will even try booting up
and accessing the hard drive
and other components in the system.
Now, in addition to that at the bottom,
you will see we also have a Hard Disc Password
and this would allow us to set a password
that would enable that hard disc
to be controlled by a password.
If you have multiple hard discs in your system,
some BIOSes will also allow you
to set an individual password
for each hard drive on the system.
And that way, when somebody tries to boot up the computer
maybe they have access to one hard drive,
but not the other.
And you'll be able to do that using those passwords.
If we scroll down here, you'll see
a couple of other options, including Secure Boot.
Now, Secure Boot will be able
to be Enabled or Disabled based on your system.
On this system, we currently have it set to BIOS mode
and Secure Boot requires you use UEFI.
So therefore we're not able to set this right now
and Secure Boot is Disabled.
All right, let's hit escape and we'll go back.
And then we're going to hit right arrow
to go over to the Startup tab.
Now, in the Startup tab, you're going to be able
to control the Boot Mode.
And you can see here that our Boot Mode is Legacy Only.
We are not supporting a UEFI-type environment.
As we go through our primary boot sequence,
this would allow us to hit enter and go into it.
And then we would be able
to move up or down these different things
in the order that we want for our particular boot sequence.
We can see the list of all of the devices
that you could use as a boot device
in this particular system,
including a USB floppy disc drive, a USB key or flash drive,
any of these devices, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5,
none of which are currently connected.
Your PCIe cards, P1 and P2,
your SATA devices, Sata 1 through 6
and then your other SATA devices,
your eSATA or external SATA, your network connectors
and USB hard drives or card readers
as well as CD ROMs and other devices.
To be able to reconfigure this boot priority,
you would select each option
and then you would hit the plus or minus key
to move them up or down in the boot order.
And that would allow you to set which ones you want
to be able to boot from and which ones you can't.
And you can hit the X key to exclude devices
that you don't want to allow to be booted from,
such as a USB key or USB external hard disc.
The final thing you need to ensure
is that when you're done changing all of your settings
that you save them.
If you don't save your settings and you leave the BIOS
everything we just configured is going to be lost.
So to save it, we would hit the F10 key
and that would save it, exit and reboot the computer for us.
If we made a mistake and we want to go back
to the defaults at any time,
we can do that by hitting F9.
But if we do that, all of our changes
will get overwritten with the default values
that were created by our motherboard's manufacturer.
All right, this was a quick tour of the BIOS
just to give you a basic understanding
of how to operate it using your arrow keys
and selecting different settings.
As I said before, you're going to be using
the BIOS less and less these days,
because most of us have moved on to UEFI
for most of our motherboards and systems.