In this day and age, We, the people who like to tweak our toys, have absolutley no control over the system bios. I'm no programmer, but it seems to me that there ought to be a way to adjust your bios to suit your needs. There are companys out there that have solved this problem in the automtivee industry, were as you can plug an adapter in between the chip and the board in an automotive control computer, and tweak the settings for improved perfomance with nothing more than a twist of a knob, or on the high end stuff, the use of a laptop. Why has no one come up with a solution like that for us? Running at 66Mhz in a 400Mhz world. Running at 66Mhz in a 400Mhz world.

Because there are limited number of options available in an automotive environment. The electronics in a motor vehicle are built for a particular engine from a particular manufacture. You cannot take the engine out of a Ford and fit it in a GM vehicle and expect the electronics to work. But thats what the BIOS is expected to do. If you knew of all the possible combinations of hardware and software a BIOS has to contend with you would be amazed that the things works at all. Having said that, you do have some control over the system BIOS, but only within the constraints of the hardware it is controlling. Stuart

"you can plug an adapter in between the chip and the board in an automotive control computer, and tweak the settings for improved perfomance with nothing more than a twist of a knob" you cannot use a computer to enter a hidden door and control a car's settings in any way that was not contemplated by the manufacturer. It may have been contemplated only for the experts, but it is still not a hack, it is a pre-made door. Computers are way more hackable than cars, but if the bios programmer wants to keep you out he can and it sounds like that's the mobo you've got. The only solution is to read the manual (all mobo manuals are available online in advance except for dell/hp/emachines/etc) first to see what you are getting into.

There are utilities out there that allow you to tweak settings that are not visible in the bios, and there are programs that will allow you to tweak and change the code in the bios itself, but both require a lot of understanding and knowhow. e.g. If it were easy, all bioses would support any hard drive size.

Well, thats some really good answers. It still kinda ticks me off, When you have one board that is identical in every way, and probably manufactured by the same company, but one has more features then the other. and you have three companys making the bios chips, that are now all merged, and they won't give out any secrets. We are just their puppets. Running at 66Mhz in a 400Mhz world.

"and they won't give out any secrets" but they do give them out for a price. Or to put it another way, they give us a discount if we let them withhold the secrets. This is only a problem if your starting point is a belief in a cost-plus economic model. That whatever it costs to make something, the price should be 1.1 times the cost, or 1.2 or whatever. Communism was based on cost-plus pricing. Free enterprise is based on a competitive-pricing model. Sometimes this leads to high margins for sellers which might be frustrating to buyers, but it always leads to low prices for buyers which is what counts.

To tweek a BIOS takes a skill at the machine language level. The BIOS interfaces the hardware to the software. There is a map of which addresses that the hardware interacts with the software. Actually there is a news/users group of programmers that make/modify there own custom BIOS's. Actually Intel has been working on this since 1998. It is called the EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). It is/was scheduled for use with IA-32/Itanium systems. Basically it looks like a method of loading drivers and services before booting the OS. Basically the BIOS goes out and looks for the files that support the motherboards hardware before loading the OS. Actually this is not really a new idea. IBM use to have SYS files loaded in config.sys to add/enhance support of various software options. A patch for the BIOS/OS.