Hi, I was often asked what's the difference of these three kinds of mods and some people are mixing up the methods. -Static mod (old mod method): The address of SLIC (address at physical memory, RAM) is fixed. At this method you have to modify the bios without the call of SLIC FIRST. After you have flashed it once, you have to find the address of SLIC (where is it mapped to) with e.g. HwDirect. After that you have to reverse the address you have found and modify the bios again (insert call). Now you can flash it again and SLIC will appear at AcpiScope, Vista activates. This method works only with a special amount of installed RAM. (e.g. mod is flashed on a machine with 1 GByte Ram installed, it will crash on a machine with e.g. 512 MByte Ram installed) This method is obsolete and nobody of us modders are using it this time. This method is of course never used by official OEM bios. -Dynamic mod: The address of SLIC is allocated by bios. The address is varying, it fits on every machine (no matter how much RAM is installed). The ISA method is dynamic. This is the method which is used by official OEM bios. (But therefore they don't use a separate ISA module). -Super static method. The address of SLIC is also fixed, but it is at a area which is accessible at every machine, no matter how much RAM is installed (FFF00000h area or 000FF200h) This method is never used by official OEM bios.
Only method 3. This method is used by official OEM as well. But no worry about SP1 final this time. It's not sure if M$ will disable static mods. There are many other ways to realize a mod. We have to see....you cannot disable static mods generally.
Yen, you were reading my mind. I am assuming that the dynamic modification will be some what more complicated for SP1 to deal with than with a static modification. Time will tell, I guess I have little choice except to wait for the release of SP1.
I'm hoping the ISA method is very hard to detect. That's what I'm using on like 5 PC's right now. Being that it's dynamic, it should not be easy to detect this method unless they scan your bios and see the actual ISA module, which I doubt they can or will do. I also have a modified bios that contains SLP 1.0 and SLP 2.0 and I used DMICFG to update the DMI strings. Basically my bios has SLIC via the ISA and reports that it is an HP Pavilion through DMI. So I have an HP computer, HP cert and HP key, should be hard to detect. I think we're safe with the ISA method.
Award bios don't have FC module at all, if yes it's AMI. Yes, there are other methods to perform a mod. I'm busy with modding since last February, same as China4Ever, Gkend and Zhaoliang. They are more complex and therefore not used at this time, but.......... To talk about this time isn't clever, you know?
You'll encounter problems with newer Award bios, which have got newer modules.......IMO it's needless to think about this time.....The best way is to wait for SP1 final! AFAIK latest build of SP1 (9th January) contains NO code to prevent bios mods. M$ is waiting and testing till the last minute. So to advice to go to the "dynamic way" isn't clever this time. The auto dynamic Award tools are not save enough. If you don't have problems with your mod, stick with it!
Does it mean, that if I flash the modded BIOS, I won't be able to change the amount of RAM on my machine without reflashing it? Are there any other disadvantages to using this method? And how easily would it be to detect? I'm asking this because the BIOS for my mobo (it is rather old) is probably modified in this way. Thanks!