Day Seven

A+

DOS

Chipsets

Questions with answers

What does BIOS stand for and what does the CMOS BIOS chip do?

Basic Input and output and basic system configuration information is stored here.

The connector shown below would be used for what?

Serial data port, in older systems, a mouse would be plugged in here.

What is a common complication when adding a 1.6G IDE hard drive to an older system such as a 16 MHz 80386 system?

a) The drive is too big for the available drive bays

b) The old style IDE connector won't plug in properly

c) The power supply may be sufficient

*d) System BIOS needs to be upgraded

During the normal PC boot process, which of the following is active first?

a) RAM BIOS

b) CMOS

*c) ROM BIOS

d) Hard disk information

When SHADOWING is enabled in a computers BIOS:

a) Values are stored twice in the memory for redundancy checking

b) The conventional memory is re-mapped to the top of the extended memory

c) Data stored in RAM chips on adapter cards are shadowed into extended memory

*d) Instructions stored in various ROM chips are copied into extended memory

What may you need to upgrade after installing a brand new IDE drive on your old PC?

a) new drive controller

b) more Ram

*c) ROM BIOS

d) new operating system

In CMOS setup, if you enable Shadowing, what happens?

a) rom memory is minimized

*b) rom is copied to ram

c) rom memory is maximized

d) rom cannot be used by the bios

Basic system configuration information is stored in

a) BIOS

b) Config.sys

c) ROM

*d) CMOS

Working with DOS

Installing DOS

FORMAT, FDISK, boot disks

Config.sys

Holds hardware MS-DOS drivers, Hardware info, which load at startup and then are stored in the system’s memory. This allows the CPU to control these devices within MS-DOS.

Which hardware devices drivers are loaded in this way?

CD-ROM, Mouse, and Network Card are examples

DRIVER PURPOSE

ANSI.SYS

CHKSTATE.SYS

DISPLAY.SYS

DRIVER.SYS

EGA.SYS

EMM386.EXE

HIGH.UMB

HIMEM.SYS

INTERLNK.EXE

POWER.EXE

RAMDRIVE.SYS

SETVER.EXE

SMARTDRV.EXE

Controls screen colours, cursor position, and key assignments.

Used by MemMaker to track memory optimization.

Allows the display of international character sets on EGA, VGA, & LCD monitors.

Creates a logical drive assigned to a physical floppy disk drive.

Used by EGA monitors to save and restore the display.

Allows access to upper memory.

HIGH loads the MS-DOS kernel into the High Memory Area. UMB allows MS-DOS drivers to be loaded into Upper Memory Blocks.

Manages extended memory, so that Windows can use this memory area.

Links two PCs to allow resource sharing.

Reduces power usage during idle time.

Creates a logical drive within RAM. This is for faster access of data. For a system that has much RAM and is always on.

Loads the MS-DOS version table into memory.

Uses extended memory to emulate disk space. Speeds up HDD’s access

Other drivers are used for other devices, these drivers are provided by hardware vendors.

Config.sys Commands

COMMAND RESULT

Break = On/Off

Buffers = n, m

Country =

Device =

DOS=high/low/umb

Driveparm =

FCBS = n

Files = n

Lastdrive =

Numblock = on/off

Set

Stacks =

Switches =

Allows the use of Ctrl+C or Ctrl+break to suspend processing

Reserves n primary RAM buffers and m Secondary buffers for data transfers to and from HDDs. Not used if SMARDRV.EXE is used.

Specifies language conventions to use. U.S. is 001

Loads a device driver.

Tells DOS to use either high memory or Upper Memory Blocks.

Specifies characteristics of the HDD.

Specifies the # of file control blocks that can be opened concurrently. (1-255)

Specifies the # of files that can be opened concurrently. (8-255)

Specifies the last logical drive DOS will recognize.

Specifies the position of the NUMBER LOCK key.

Sets a system variable, such as the name of a device.

Specifies the amount of RAM to be used for processing interrupts.

N= the # of stacks (0 or 8-64) to use

S= the size of a stack, in bytes (0 or 32-512).

/F= skips the two second delay

/K= causes an enhanced keyboard to behave like a conventional one.

/N= prevents the use of F5 and F8 at startup.

/W= Specifies the location of WIN20.386, if not on the root directory.

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS

DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM

DOS=HIGH,UMB

BUFFERS=30,0

FILES=255

LASTDRIVE=E

STACKS=32,512

If upper memory conflicts occur, you can change EMM386.EXE to

DEVICE = C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE I=B000-B7FF X=DC00-DFFF RAM

AUTOEXEC.BAT

(65)

The autoexec.bat file is used by MS-DOS during startup to set the environment.

It will include paths to drivers, files, and drivers, needed for the system to run.

C:\DOS\SMARTDRIVE.EXE

PROPMPT $P$G

SET TEMP=C:\TEMP

IF EXIST C:\TEMP\*.TMP echo y | del c:\temp\*.*

\CDROM\MSCDEX /D:CDROM1

PATH C:\WINDOWS; C:\WP; C:\DOS

Win

COMMAND PURPOSE

Prompt

Path

Loadhigh =

Shell =

Set

Specifies how the command prompt is to be displayed.

Specifies which directories (folders) to look into when asked to run a program.

Loads a device driver into upper memory.

Specifies characteristics of the command interpreter that MS-DOS will use.

Specifies the locations and variables used by applications.

Multiple Configurations Files

[MENU]

MENUITEM

[*]

HELP

Chipsets that support Athlon and DDR memory

Chipsets are the parts of the motherboard that direct and control data flow though the whole motherboard. The diagram below shows the fastest Athlon/ DDR chipset, the Via KT266. We will look at chipset performance from the options given to us today.

As you can see, the chipset allows everything to communicate with everything else. So it is very important to have a very fast chipset to have a fast PC.

Si Sandra Memory FPU score using a 1.33 GHz Athlon and Windows 98SE

Chipset	Score	Graph
Via KT 266A	932
AMD 760	808
SIS 735	788
Via KT 266	634
ALi Magik 1	631

* Higher scores mean better performance in applications and real world situations. Motherboards based on the Via Apollo KT266 will be the highest performance boards from this roundup (nVidia was not available for testing). There are two Via KT 266 chipsets, one with an A and one without. The version with the A is the newer performance enhanced chip.

Here is a chart showing Athlon/DDR chipsets.

Chipset	VIA Apollo KT266	VIA Apollo KT266A	AMD 760	SiS 735	ALi Magik 1	NVIDIA nForce 220	NVIDIA nForce 440
Introduction	April 2001	September 2001	November 2000	May 2001	December 2000	October 2001	November 2001
Max. Memory Support	4 GB	4 GB	2 GB	1.5 GB	2 GB	1.5 GB	1.5 GB
Integrated Graphics	no	no	no	no	no	yes	yes
Max. Memory Bandwidth	2.2 GB/s	2.2 GB/s	2.2 GB/s	2.2 GB/s	2.2 GB/s	2.2 GB/s	4.3 GB/s
FSB	200/266 MHz	200/266 MHz	200/266 MHz	200/266 MHz	200/266 MHz	200/266 MHz	200/266 MHz

Chipsets that support Intel Pentium II/III, Celeron

Chipset	Intel 440 ZX	Intel 440BX	Intel 810E	Intel 810E2	Intel 815E	Intel 820E	Intel 840
Memory size Support	16MB, 64MB, 128MB	16MB, 64MB, 128MB	16MB, 64MB, 128MB	16MB, 64MB, 128MB	16MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB	64MB, 128MB, 256MB	64MB, 28MB, 256MB
Max. Memory Support	256 MB	1 GB	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB	1 GB	4 GB
Integrated Graphics	no	no	yes	yes	no	no	no
Max. Memory Bandwidth	.8 GB/s	.8 GB/s	.8 GB/s	1.6 GB/s	1.6 GB/s	1.9 GB/s	1.9 GB/s
FSB	66/100 MHz	66/100 MHz	66/100 MHz	66/100/133 MHz	100/133 MHz	100/133 MHz	133 MHz

Intel's 820 Chipset for "Tualatin" Pentium III and SDRAM

The Tualatin is P-III built on the smaller .13 micron process. older P-III were built on the larger .18 micron process.