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V. DESKTOP MANAGEMENT
Desktop Management Interface (DMI)
Introducing the DMI utility
This motherboard supports DMI within the BIOS level and provides a DMI
Utility to maintain the Management Information Format Database (MIFD).
DMI is able to auto-detect and record information pertinent to a computer's
system such as the CPU type, CPU speed, and internal/external frequen-
cies, and memory size. The onboard BIOS will detect as many system in-
formation as possible and store those collected information in a 4KB block
in the motherboard's Flash EPROM and allow the DMI to retrieve data
from this database. Unlike other BIOS software, the BIOS on this mother-
board uses the same technology implemented for Plug and Play to allow
dynamic real-time updating of DMI information versus creating a new BIOS
image file and requiring the user to update the whole BIOS. This DMI
utility also allows the system integrator or end user to add additional infor-
mation into the MIFD such as serial numbers, housing configurations, and
vendor information. Those information not detected by the motherboard
BIOS and has to manually entered through the DMI Utility and updated
into the MIFD. This DMI utility provides the same reliability as PnP updat-
ing and will prevent the refreshing failures associated with updating the
entire BIOS.
System Requirements
The motherboard BIOS must support DMI. The following motherboards
do not support DMI:
• P/I-P6RP4
• PCI/E-P54NP4
• PCI/I-P54NP4D
The DMI Utility (DMICFG.EXE) must be ran in real mode in order for the
program to run, the base memory must be at least 180K. Memory managers
like HIMEM.SYS (required by windows) must not be installed. You can
boot up from a system diskette without AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS
files, "REM" HIMEM.SYS in the CONFIG.SYS, or press <F5> during boot-
up to bypass your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files.
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P/I-P55TP4N User's Manual
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