What Does the BIOS Control?
Now that you understand what the BIOS does, it's time to dive into the details.
The BIOS is a complex piece of firmware (“software on a chip”) that provides support for the following devices and features of your system:
Selection and configuration of storage devices connected to the motherboard's host adapters, such as hard drives, floppy drives, and CD-ROM drives
Configuration of main and cache memory
Configuration of built-in ports, such as ATA/IDE and Serial ATA hard disk, floppy disk, serial, parallel, PS/2 mouse, USB, and IEEE-1394 ports
Configuration of integrated (built into the motherboard chipset) audio, network, and graphics features when present
Selection and configuration of special motherboard features, such ...
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