Changing BIOS settings within windows 7?

[Joe Glentine]

At my company I setup and deploy many windows 7 machines. I use a start-up batch file to do most of the work and a few other files in the start-up folder, this is all imaged to the hard drive with a hard drive duplicator. The batch file runs once and deletes it self. Anyways, that is the general idea of what is going on. the only thing left that I have to do manually is change the BIOS settings, USB enabled/disabled, behavior on power up, BIOS password, ect... Is there any way I could automate this process, preferably a command line? Thanks!

 

[marsmimar]

Hello Joe and welcome to Seven Forums.

Since the BIOS is part of the motherboard, I think it's very possible that even computers from the same manufacturer could use different motherboards and different BIOS. (As of May 16, 2012 Microsoft recognized about 60 different BIOS manufacturers.)

List of BIOS Manufacturer Web Sites Part 1

Since each BIOS probably has its own specific way to access changeable parameters, I'm not sure that a command line or batch file approach would work. Perhaps some more knowledgeable Forum members will jump in with a better suggestion.

 

[DeaconFrost]

There should be little reason to be configuring BIOS options on OEM systems, to be honest. Especially not assigning BIOS passwords. That will create more problems than it solves. When you visit the system to power it up with it's newly duplicated drive, configure the options before actually booting to Windows 7, and then you'll be set to deliver the system.

 

[Joe Glentine]

With some looking around I don't find it to very possible. I was looking at the different motherboards on all the computer and I came up with about 13 or 14 different ones. Anyways I need to set-up a BIOS password for the computers because I can't have users enabling their USB ports, because most of our users are storing highly sensitive information of their computers and that is just one of the things we do to try to prevent data from being stolen.

 

[DeaconFrost]

Ah...that would definitely fall into the "unique situations" category. I'm not expert in this particular area, but I think you might be able to prevent USB port usage via group policy.