1. "No one can tell you what the BIOS is, you have to see it for yourself."

Okay, Morpheus is lying to you. Admittedly, it's a lot easier to grok the BIOS when you're looking at it, but then you wouldn't need to be reading this for pointers, would you? On second thought, don't answer that.

First and foremost, what is the BIOS? It's a little bit of software that lives in a chip on the motherboard and tells your hardware how to behave at a more fundamental level than your operating system. It controls everything that matters, including memory timing, and CPU speed, along with a host of other variables that don't necessarily make things go faster. As such, we're going to ignore them so you can make with the tweaking, and not with the glassy-eyed DMV employee impersonations.

2. "Flash, I love you, but we only have twenty-four hours to save the earth!"

First, let's make sure we have the latest and greatest version of our board's BIOS. Unlike a device driver, this wasn't always able to be installed from inside our OS (and in some cases, still can't), so we'll need to flash the BIOS on the board itself. Fortunately, you no longer need to be as devious as the dude pictured here to do so, as the good folks at Phoenix and AMI have developed utilities that allow newer versions to be downloaded and installed in a more conventional (and less onerous) manner, especially since so few of us are sporting 1.44MB floppy drives to boot from these days. As with device driver updates, BIOS updates tend to improve stability and performance, and in many cases, provide greater leeway and headroom for performance tweaking (by expanding the range of supported CPUs or FSB multipliers, for instance).


Okay, end of disclaimer. On with the show!