October 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 44m
English
Content preview from PC Hacks
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Hack #5. Display a Boot-Time Graphic
Many computers will display a graphic at boot time. Make it one of your own.
Intel and most of the PC OEMs want to remind you who made the system, so they have built in a boot-time graphic as seen in Figure 1-6. Boot-time graphics are an alternative to the technical bits and bytes that have traditionally appeared on PC boot screens. Displaying the graphic takes extra time in order to load up the graphic image stored in the BIOS memory chip and configure the video to display graphics. As techies are interested in faster performance, product logos are not of much interest.
Figure 1-6. An Intel boot-time graphic hides the technical details of P.O.S.T.
If your system BIOS is stored in FLASH RAM (instead of a conventional old-style EPROM), it may be possible to load your own graphic into the BIOS chip. To perform this hack you need a BIOS that supports boot-time graphics and the appropriate software programs to make the changes and write them into your BIOS FLASH ROM chip. Most implementations of Award BIOS Versions 4.5 and up support boot-time graphics display. You will need a couple of software programs, as follows:
A graphics program to either create a new graphics file or convert an existing one to a 64048016-color uncompressed BMP graphic file for display at bootup (I didn't say it would or had to be an impressive graphic, just a graphic file)
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.