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BIOS display speed

N

NRaygun

Member
OK, here's a weird one.

When I enter BIOS on my old Dell XPS D300, the BIOS screens display slow. It takes a few seconds to move from tab to tab. It's also slow to cursor down to make selections.

The system has a CDROM, Zipdisk, 8GB drive, 250GB drive.

Is it the power supply?
Is it the video card slowly dying?
 
It could be your cmos battery dying, or as you previously mentioned it could possibly be your psu or video card. Is your display only slow in BIOS? Have any spare parts you could troubleshoot with?
 
Was it always thus? If so, then it is a characteristic of your computer, and you're stuck with it. I don't really see it as a problem, unless you constantly have the need to enter the bios.
 
Make sure your jumpers on the hdd's are set right. I've seen a problem similar to this from jumpers that were incorect.

I've seen bios' that were slow to enter, but I don't think I've seen it be continuously slow.
 
Thanks for the info everyone. Here's the latest:

1. I swapped video cards (from a Riva128 to a Voodoo3)
2. I removed the power and IDE cable from the second 250GB drive
3. I tried setting the jumper of the 250GB drive to Cable Select

None of the above helped the BIOS situation. I remember it being very fast.

I'll try reloading the BIOS. Because of the age of the machine(Dell XPS D300), there probably are not any new BIOS updates. Maybe just writing a new copy to flash memory will do the trick.

Stay tuned.
 
Originally posted by: NRaygun
Thanks for the info everyone. Here's the latest:

1. I swapped video cards (from a Riva128 to a Voodoo3)
2. I removed the power and IDE cable from the second 250GB drive
3. I tried setting the jumper of the 250GB drive to Cable Select

None of the above helped the BIOS situation. I remember it being very fast.

I'll try reloading the BIOS. Because of the age of the machine(Dell XPS D300), there probably are not any new BIOS updates. Maybe just writing a new copy to flash memory will do the trick.

Stay tuned.
Click to expand...

What are your BIOS settings for "Video BIOS Cache", "Video BIOS Shadow", "System BIOS Cache", and "System BIOS Shadow"? If you want your BIOS setup screens to run quickly, make sure that these are all enabled. However, most modern video cards like video BIOS shadowing/caching to be disabled, and system BIOS caching/shadowing doesn't really matter anymore, unless you are still running real-mode MS-DOS.

Also, some video cards, have embedded in their BIOSes, a different text-mode display-rate. Most of them have text output display throttled downwards (slower), because otherwise, scrolling a screen in text-mode would be literally unreadable on today's fast machines.)

Unless you are seeing slowdown on your machine in other ways, I wouldn't worry at all about this issue.
 
I guess since Linux doesnt seem to have a problem, I'll just ignore this symptom.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.
 
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