I had a quick email from a Sarah in NJ asking about exactly what a BIOS is, here is a quick explanation of what a BIOS is and what it does.

The term is incorrectly known as Binary Input/Output System, Basic Integrated Operating System and occasionally Built In Operating System. BIOS refers to the firmware code run by a personal computer when first powered on.

The primary function of the BIOS is to identify and initiate component hardware, (such as hard drives, floppies, and CDs). This is to prepare the machine so other software programs stored on various media can load, execute, and assume control of the PC. This process is known as booting, or booting up, which is short for bootstrapping.

The BIOS software has a number of different roles, but its most important role is to load the operating system.

When you turn on your computer and the microprocessor tries to execute its first instruction, it has to get that instruction from somewhere. It cannot get it from the operating system because the operating system is located on a hard disk, and the microprocessor cannot get to it without some instructions that tell it how.

The BIOS provides those instructions. Some of the other common tasks that the BIOS performs include:

• A power-on self-test (POST) for all of the different hardware components in the system to make sure everything is working properly
• Activating other BIOS chips on different cards installed in the computer – For example, SCSI and graphics cards often have their own BIOS chips.
• Providing a set of low-level routines that the operating system uses to interface to different hardware devices – It is these routines that give the BIOS its name. They manage things like the keyboard, the screen, and the serial and parallel ports, especially when the computer is booting.
• Managing a collection of settings for the hard disks, clock, etc.

I hope that cleared up any questions you had on BIOS Sarah, thank for the inquiry.

It’s not only your home computer that has glitches from time to time (or more often!), even million dollar computers that run our cities can fail.  As was seen in Seattle this week when a simple computer glitch caused the total shutdown of a major bus tunnel.

The blue screen of death in a bus lane – I don’t think so!!

Read the full story here;

Do you have heaps of irrelevant programs starting up when you boot, then follow these instruction to stop them loading at bootup;

• Go to Start and type in Run
• Type Msconfig
  
• A System Configuration box will pop up
• Click the Startup tab
• Uncheck on the programs you do not want to start at the boot process
• Click OK and you are done

This will increase the speed of your boot process and make things easier for you all.

I was amazed to find out how many of our readers have had trouble clearing their search history on google, it is a very simple process to do – just follow these steps;

• Click the Web History link from the Google Accounts page.
• Click Remove items. You’ll then be in edit mode.
• Select any items you don’t want and click the Remove button. There’s also a link to clear your entire web history.

It is that simply… talk to you guys tomorrow

Here is a quick step by step guide on how to change to a new Firefox theme;

• Navigate to Tools/Add-Ons menu
• Click on the Themes tab to see available themes
• Click on the Get Themes link at the bottom of the menu
• Select a Theme
• Click on the Title Text to download the theme you chose
• Click the Install Now button
• Once you have installed you will be back at the themes menu
• Select your new theme and click Enable
• Restart Firefox and you are done

What is a  Segmentation Fault

A segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault) is a particular error condition that can occur during the operation of computer software.

A segmentation fault occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location that it is not allowed to access, or attempts to access a memory location in a way that is not allowed (for example, attempting to write to a read-only location, or to overwrite part of the operating system). Systems based on processors like the Motorola 68000 tend to refer to these events as address or bus errors.

Segmentation is one approach to memory management and protection in the operating system. It has been superseded by paging for most purposes, but much of the terminology of segmentation is still used, “segmentation fault” being an example.

Some operating systems still have segmentation at some logical level although paging is used as the main memory management policy.

On Unix-like operating systems, a process that accesses invalid memory receives the SIGSEGV signal. On Microsoft Windows, a process that accesses invalid memory receives the STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION exception.