Difference Between CMOS and BIOS

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CMOS or BIOS? What's the difference?

The CMOS (pronounced "sea moss") is a computer chip responsible for storing settings of a computer system. The word "CMOS" is actually an acronym which stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor.

Most users have undoubtedly witnessed a message stating "Press DEL to enter Setup", or something similar when a computer has been powered on. If the DEL key was pressed at this instance, something called a CMOS utility screen would appear on the screen. Various hardware settings can be manipulated on this screen, such as the geometry of a hard drive, which device to boot first, and so on.

BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System. The BIOS holds the most basic computer instructions required to boot a computer into an operating system such as DOS or Windows. You can think of the BIOS as a mini pre-operating system.