Physical Memory, Flash ROM Upgrades, Memory On The Systemboard, Memory On Expansion Boards, Memory Speed

Flash ROM Upgrades

BE VERY CAREFUL that you upgrade the BIOS with the correct upgrade. Upgrading with the wrong file could make your system BIOS totally useless. If you’re not sure that you’re using the correct upgrade, DON’T GUESS. Check with the technical support for your BIOS before moving forward. Before you call technical support, have the information that is written on the BIOS chip label available.

To upgrade Flash ROM, follow the directions that came with your systemboard and the upgrade software itself. Generally, you will perform these tasks: Set a jumper on the systemboard telling the BIOS what to expect Copy the upgrade software to a bootable disk Boot from the disk and follow the menu options to upgrade the BIOS Reset the jumper, reboot the system, and verify that all is working.

ROM BIOS

The ROM chips on the systemboard contain much of the BIOS for your computer. The BIOS stored in the ROM chips on your systemboard is called System BIOS or ROM BIOS.

Memory On The Systemboard

The systemboard contains both ROM and RAM and memory cache. ROM chips are usually socketed onto the systemboard. ROM chips on the systemboard are easy to spot because they are larger than most chips and often have a shiny plastic label on them. The manufacturer’s name, the date of manufacture, and the serial number of the chip are located on the label. Memory On A Pentium Systemboard, ROM BIOS Chip, External (L2) Cache Slot, CPU Containing Internal (L1) Cache SIMM Slots

Memory On Expansion Boards

Expansion boards can contain both ROM chips and RAM chips. Expansion boards may have RAM to hold data and ROM to store programs. A good example is a video card with video RAM on-board. Video BIOS for the card, stored on ROM chips, processes the data from the CPU and presents it to the monitor. Data is written to the video RAM on the card by the CPU and read from the video RAM by the video BIOS.

Indications Of Insufficient Or Defective RAM

The occurrence of frequent General Protection Fault Error errors in Windows, application errors, and errors that cause the system to hang can be caused by poor-quality memory chips.

Memory Speed

The documentation for a systemboard states what speed of memory to use on the board and is usually written as something like this: “Use 70 ns or faster.” So, in this example, 60 ns will work on this board, but 80-ns memory will cause problems. It is possible, but not recommended, to mix the speed of memory modules on a systemboard, but don’t mix the speeds within a single memory bank.