Shadowing the BIOS.

[Aunty Em]

What exactly is this and how do you do it?

The program Sandra 2003 tells me that I can shadow my bios but I'm not sure what this is or why I should to do it. ?(

I've already enabled cacheing but the only mention of shadowing I can find in my BIOS is Video Bios Shadow in Advanced Bios Features which is enabled but none of the addresses are e.g. C8000-CBFFF Shadow. I presume these are IRQ addresses for the cards.

 

[Justintime]

don't bother, it basically copies the ROM into the physical (RAM) memory and remaps the RAM into the normal address space of the BIOS, which is an advantage for stuff like DOS, but since windows uses the bios for startup only i doubt it'd be of any help and only add more stuff to the RAM.

 

[Aunty Em]

This is the explanation that Sandra gives:

The BIOS can be shadowed. Shadowing is a technique of copying the BIOS program from slow EPROM or EEPROM to RAM. This may yield some increase in performance.
Fix: Go to BIOS set-up and make sure that System BIOS is both shadowed and cached.

I wonder what other people think?

 

[Bubba]

i wouldn't do it either

 

[Gonz]

Almost all BIOS caches are off in mine. No point in wasting 512+RAM

 

[Luis G]

IT won't waste memory because it is copied to the alrady reserved 384KB zone, there are only 2 zones that are worth shadowing: system bios and video bios.

Don't bother with the others, some of them are meant to shadow old SCSI cards BIOS, and stuff like that.

 

[fury]

You won't notice much difference, but it won't hurt to turn it on either.

But some video cards tell you NOT to turn on shadowing of the video BIOS.

 

[Luis G]

But some video cards tell you NOT to turn on shadowing of the video BIOS.

wow, that's something i've never seen.
Same as microsoft suggesting to disable "PnP OS" if you use XP.

 

[fury]