FalconFour

Thought I’d share a useful piece of information with you guise that seems to be curiously omitted from the internet. I learned it from the intarwebs, but I don’t recall where – and subsequent Googling for all possible variations of the term “f11 bios trick” seem to have turned me up blank. Mostly results regarding using F11 to pick an alternate boot device.

The F11 trick seems to be a fairly widespread “alternative” BIOS Setup access thing, for PC techs. So far I’ve tried it on three systems – my new Acer Athlon 64 x2 laptop, an HP Pentium 4 desktop, and an eMachines Pentium 4 motherboard (seriously, it runs without a case on top of my dresser). It worked on the eMachines and HP systems, and gave me additional options for fan speed control, integrated video VRAM and timing options, RAM timing, etc… stuff you NEVER expected to see in an OEM bios!

The trick is simply to press the F11 key instead of F1 or DEL to enter setup. If it works, it’ll flash “Enterting Setup…” on the boot screen like usual, then give you the usual Setup screen. You’ve just got to keep your eyes peeled for the “unlocked” options – new options in the menus that weren’t there before!

Hopefully this helps some geeks… give the thread a good bump if you would. Log in to see images!

edit: buh typo

edit: insert typical “if you break it it’s not my fault” disclaimer here… every computer has a thousand safeguards against a single keystroke blowing up the computer, but this is here to protect me from the inevitable “you broke my computer” troll. Log in to see images! FalconFour edited this message on 12/15/2008 4:31AM