Help needed with HP laptop bios

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

Hi I have a hewlet packard Pavillion laptop. When I enter bios setup there are
only a few things I can acess. ie. Time and date setting, Passwords and
numlock.
There appears to be no way of changing settings such as memory timings,
shadowing or suchlike.

I recently ran a benchmarking program which gave abysmal results. It told me
that the bios had been set to safe defaults. Problem is How can I tell without
access. And how can I fine tune.

Hope someone can help. She's running like a sloth at the moment.

Nick, In Norwich UK

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

> There appears to be no way of changing settings such as memory timings,
> shadowing or suchlike.

Detailed options are not often provided in laptop BIOSes.

Modern PCs can't turn off BIOS shadowing, because the BIOS is stored
in a compressed format in flash, and decompressed into shadow RAM at
powerup.

If the laptop uses a standard BIOS (Award, AMI, Phoenix etc) then you
can load the BIOS image file (off an upgrade disk) into a
feature-editor and unhide any options that have been hidden by HP,
then flash with this special custom version. Risky, though. And it's
not a good idea to fool with fine-tuned chipset parameters on a laptop
anyway. I have twice destroyed a laptop motherboard due to overheating
doing this

If it is a totally custom BIOS then you have no options.