what does "Video BIOS Shadowed" means?

title says it all

I get this phrase whenever i open my laptop "Video BIOS Shadowed" is it a good thing or a bad thing? and what is it technically?

you can explain it in details np i can follow up

thanx

 

Everything I'm reading on the web about that is bad. Is your laptop booting up normally and everything, or is this before the OS boots?

 

I also get it as well when I'm booting and it's at the BIOS boot part.

 

I believe it just means that a copy of the Video BIOS is stored in system RAM so that it can be accessed faster; not that I know when exactly it needs to be accessed, and I might be wrong.

 

might find this usefull

Tech ARP - Video BIOS Shadowing

as TurbodTalon said doesn't look any good on modern OS

 

Lol, we don't have much choice, it's enabled by default and no way to change it in the BIOS. We ALL have both our system BIOS and video BIOS shadowed. During boot up you can pause the screen at just the right time you can catch it where it says it. Many times desktop BIOS's allow you to control it, but most modern laptops do not give you any control over it.

 

thanx for the link rep+

I am sure there should be a way to disable it.

now thats the Video Bios (we know that best if its disabled unless you play doom on dos, Lol)

what about the normal BIOS? is shadowing it worth doing?

and if anyone wants to see where it says "Video Bios SHadowed" put your batteries one, and run your laptop without plugging the AC, you will see that the screen will stop and says "its better for you to plug in the AC bla bla for best performance " then you can see it.

its important to note that before i installed the latest Dell VBIOS i didnt see this message (or did i?)

edit: dajohu already put a screenshot of the message

 

Shadowing is a old technique and if I remember correctly should not hinder any performance at all. I remember testing it quite a bit when it was first introduced and not noticing any impact whatsoever.

I haven't read the article yet but I usually turn any type of shadowing off now. We've gone passed having to do that I think.

 

any idea on how to do it in our machines? R2? (i.e. disabling shadowing)

I have checked the advanced settings in the BIOS and i didnt find anything related to recaching / shadowing / etc ? let alone the VBIOS shadowing

 

does it really matter?...mine has said that since day one and it still runs flawlessly, i live by the moto "if it ain't broke don't fix it"

 

it does matter because while searching on it some people indicated that turning it off might be better, so why it is enabled? doesnt hurt to know alittle more about our laptop

i have found some interesting discussion at some forum "Video BIOS Shadow" Enable or Disable? - AnandTech Forums

"Peter" who says that he is a "BIOS engineer" says it does not matter wither the option is turned off or on because its going to be ON anyways, ... but then again this discussion was in 2002, almost 9 years from now ...

 

BIOS shadowing copies very slow access ROM data into very quick access RAM and used to give a *huge* improvement in performance back in the day (x86, P1, P2 days). I hadn't really heard about it since then. I'd assumed that ROM technology had reached a point that it was no longer necessary, but perhaps the opposite was true and that since RAM has become so abundant, they just always default shadowing to "on" now. Thinking about it more, the latter is more likely the case.

Regardless, I wouldn't stress too much over it. If it's copied to RAM, it definitely won't be slower than it just being accessed in ROM. Also, you're talking about a very small amount of data, around 4.5MB. The system BIOS is about 4.3MB and the VBIOS is 128KB. When you're talking about most of our machines having 4GB, mine having 8GB, 4.5MB is nothing to lose sleep over, especially if it's actually helping performance still.