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ADVANCED TUTORIAL: This is an advanced tutorial. The following steps should only be performed by an advanced user. Improper or accidental changes to the system BIOS could permanently damage your system.
You should disable any legacy ports you do not use, particularly the parallel (LPT) and serial (COM) ports. The Parallel port uses a non-shareable hardware IRQ of 7; the first serial port uses a non-shareable IRQ of 4, and the second port a non-shareable IRQ of 3. By disabling unused legacy ports and specifying that these IRQs can be used by Plug and Play (PnP) devices, you make it easier for Windows and the BIOS to configure USB,
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| Onboard audio should be disabled if you have a sound card installed. If you use onboard audio, you don't need to enable Sound Blaster settings unless you use older applications which require Sound Blaster compatibility.
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| On many systems with integrated video, you can adjust the size of the display buffer, which specifies the amount of memory dedicated to video. Increasing the size of the display buffer might enable you to use higher resolutions with 24-bit or 32-bit color quality. However, memory used for the display buffer is subtracted from system memory. For example, if you have 256MB of RAM and have a display buffer size of 32MB, your available RAM is only 224MB (256-32). Some recent chipsets dynamically adjust the size of the display buffer.
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| You should leave all ATA/IDE host adapters enabled unless you use Serial ATA or SCSI as your boot device. If you use only ATA/IDE and ATAPI drives, place your ATA/IDE hard disk on the primary host adapter (IDE Channel 0), and the CD or DVD (ATAPI) drive on the secondary host adapter (IDE Channel 1). IDE Prefetch mode (see figure) is also known as Block mode. It is often enabled and configured through the user-defined drive type.
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| Enable the SATA host adapters only if you use SATA drives. If you enable the host adapters without having any SATA drives present, your system will waste time searching for the drives each time you boot your system.
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| Disable ATA or SATA RAID unless you are using two or more matched drives in a RAID array. When you enable RAID, the drives connected to the RAID host adapters will be treated as a RAID array after you configure them. If you disable RAID, most motherboards will use these host adapters as additional SATA or ATA host adapters for individual drives.
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| If your system supports USB 2.0, be sure to specify it in the system BIOS setup and install appropriate drivers in Windows. Enable USB Legacy Mode if you use a USB keyboard; this enables you to run your USB keyboard in BIOS setup or outside of the Windows GUI. Connect a PS/2 keyboard if necessary to set up this option. Enable all USB ports unless your system is unable to power them or they cause conflicts with other devices.
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| Enable the IEEE-1394 ports if you have or plan to connect IEEE-1394 devices. If your system does not support USB 2.0, you can connect some types of external hard disks and other devices to the IEEE-1394 port instead of the slower USB 1.1 port.
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| The onboard network port usually supports 10/100 Ethernet. Disable it only if you use a different type of network card.
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