speeding up bios POST

[Matt Price]

hi folks,

i'm building a brand-new system, which i have to say is blazing fast --
it's built around an asus p5n7a-vm MB, with a mid-level core2duo chip.
I've installed ubuntu jaunty, which boots pretty quickly from grub --
less than 20 seconds to gnome session -- but, to me astonishingly, it
takes 15 seconds from power-on to GRUB.  this just seems crazy long, and
I wonder what I can do to change it.  The BIOS is a pretty standard
American Megatrends AMIBIOS, on which I've enabled 'quickboot' (that did
seem to help a little) and disabled the express gate, which wasn't
working anyway (i'm actually not even sure if the flash module is
installed on the board, don't really knowmuch about express-gate).  but
there are still long pauses I can't explain.  so i'm wondering:  is
there a way to 'bootchart' your bios?  or are there standard methods for
speeding it up?  

thanks as always,

matt


ps, if someone can explain the expressgatething to me, i'd be grateful
for that as well.  i'm wondering if i could just install my main OS on a
CF card and boot directly into that without having to go through
BIOS...  

-- 
Matt Price
matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists