What is a "rom cache"

[garethedmondson]

We have a few computers here that are playing up. The techie tells me that Stone tell him there is an issue with the "rom cache". The machines don't turn on.

I've googled this but not found anything.

Anyone enlighten me?

Many thanks,

Gareth

[pooley]

Thinking it may be in the same box as tartan paint and sky hooks?

[LosOjos]

Could your tech have spoken to a monkey who meant BIOS? I've never heard of a "ROM CACHE", but thinking outside the box all I can guess they mean is the BIOS...

[SYNACK]

Depending on their level of clue they could be talking about BIOS ROM cache. This is a feature of usually older BIOSs that copies the contents of the BIOS ROM into a chunk of RAM for much quicker access when the system requests information from it in comparison to slow ROM memory. This was a feature that did give a decent little speed boost to old OSs like Windows 95/98 that actually made use of the BIOS all the time for stuff. 'Newer' OSs like Windows 2000 and above use a hardware abstraction layer that makes very little use of the BIOS apart from initial bootup. These newer systems hardly ever hit the BIOS during operation making the feature of little use.

As a reason for a machine not booting I find it inplausable unless it is switched on and the RAM it mirrors to is damaged or the implementation is messy and it gets in the OSs way by using memory it is not supposed to.

There was also a simmilar feature that mirrored video card BIOSs into memory for the same purpose but these features are kind of ancient history in the world of computers.

[garethedmondson]

So to get sme clarity on the matter I asked the school technician what this was and this is what I got:

"This is not straight forward, it is difficult to explain without explaining the functionality with processors. I found a wiki that explains a form of "caching" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-mapped_I/O"

Does this make sense? Obviously I'm not technican enough to understand what he is on about - but I've never heard the term rom cache in the 12 years I've been teaching and fixing PCs.

Gareth

[localzuk]

Sounds like a bit of a fluff of a response to me. Have you tried removing and then reseating the memory modules in the machines?

[jsnetman]

According to one website its the ability for some bios's to load their settings into ram to produce faster boot up times. In the bios its called bios shadowing.

System BIOS Cacheable

Apologies did not read the earlier post.

[Hedghog]

@garethedmonson
I have a few fujitsus' and others which have a faulty power management utility- If allowed to hibernate it is next to impossible to start the PC normally. The only cure in my case is to remove the power from the PC at the plug, restart the PC and go to the relevent part of control panel and inhibit hibernation. I know this may not be your problem but I thought it worth posting.

Peter

[garethedmondson]

Bringing this to a close - the machines which were showing the never heard of 'rom-cache' symptoms are all the machines I've posted about in this post:

Issue with Stone Machines

Gareth