OEM's and CMOS Settings?

jolly good asks: "Back in the good old days all CMOS were accessed exactly the same way because there was an agreed upon standard in place. These days, however, motherboard feature sets have expanded to the point where the old 128 byte CMOS standard is no longer adequate. This has lead to different proprietary methods to access the upper 128 bytes in CMOS as there isn't a standard for a 256 byte CMOS. What I'd like to know is how are OEM's handling duplicating CMOS settings across large numbers of machines on production lines?"

Comments

But!!

[krinsh]

At least I tried to answer your question instead of insulting you. I asked an EE guy I know and he said that generally OEMs flash the chips in a factory on mass-burn equipment, test a sample of them and then pass them on to the next stage in the motherboard manufacturing process. He thinks. Testing is done at each phase but the real testing is done before and after the computer is assembled altogether; but only baseline stuff - when you make thousands a day that's what they have warranties for. So there, maybe that will be more helpful and hopefully I got a right answer from him.

My guess

[MrResistor]

I don't work for the kind of OEM you're talking about, and I generally don't work specifically with BIOS, but I do deal with PROMs every day.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, if you didn't know it already, but PROM stands for Programble Read Only Memory, which is often erasable and/or reprogramable in any of a number of ways, designated as EPROMs, EEPROMS, etc. These PROMs are often manufactured using CMOS technology, hence the reason the PROM your BIOS resides on is refered to as CMOS.

Anyway, the default settings are determined at design time, and there are far more settings than any motherboard vendor will ever let you look at. (Most of those you wouldn't want to change anyway, as doing so could completely hose your system.) The design team produces an image, which is then put on the PROM with a PROM Burner, which is basically a chip socket hooked up to a computer running software that enables it to access the features of the PROM. Burning a PROM generally takes less than a minute, and I've used Gang Burners that could do up to 4 at a time. Most likely an OEM would have one larger than that.

The PROM comes off the Burner with the default settings already set, and the assembler (man or machine) just puts it in the socket on the motherboard. It's entirely possible that no one ever turns on the machine until you get it. (The hard drives are likely loaded using cloners, basically a Gang Burner for HDDs)

Dell only owns any given desktop PC for an hour (a little less, actually). The parts are the property of the supplier until they hit the loading dock, and the computer becomes the property of the customer as soon as it hits the shipping dock. Certainly, there is no time for manual BIOS settings or installing stuff to the hard drive. At best, they power it up once just to make sure it works., though they probably don't even do that.

I hope that answers your question and then some.