The end of the BIOS

[john]

And not before time too.

Whilst it may be technically acurate why do they always have to name things which do not have a lot of meaning to most people. Do they think that  UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) has an obvious meaning.

I'm sure there are other things they could do to speed up the booting of a PC like holding the OS on dedicated solidstate memory rather than a hard drive.

[pctech]

You can replace your hard disk with a solid state drive but its expensive at the moment.

[Glenn]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001NPCTBE/ is one example

[john]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001NPCTBE/ is one example

That's good (if a bit pricey) but if the cost to PC manufacturers for say a fast 10-15 Gb drive built in would be much cheaper.

Possibly the OS could be installed onto a USB drive, not sure if the BIOS could boot it from one but the new UEFI probably could.

[pctech]

I doubt very much MS or indeed Apple for that matter would welcome the idea of having the OS boot from a USB device.

[Steve]

Macs have been using EFI (UEFI since 2005) since 2006 and yes you can install Snow Leopard onto a USB drive if you wish and indeed it's common practise to keep a cloned external drive for backup purposes. Just plug it in select startup disk and away you go.

[pctech]

You learn something new every day

[Steve]

It's a useful feature if the internal drive gets messed up , i.e boot from the external clone and then clone it back onto the internal drive.

[zappaDPJ]

That's one huge advantage Macs have, not having to rely on legacy architecture. PCs are being hamstrung because of backward compatibility issues so it's good to see some change for the better.

[Odos]

PCs are being hamstrung because of backward compatibility issues so it's good to see some change for the better.

That I disagree with, UEFI is not a step forward, from what I can see the only advantage to it is that it cuts costs for manufacturers. My motherboard has had a UEFI available for a couple of years now. I tried it three times as each new update was released. It was a load of garbage, took the machine LONGER to get to the OS than the bios did and it would wrongly read my equipment. I don't know for certain but I think they gave up with it as there has been no new updates 

Reading the article posted in the opening post of this thread the impression I get is that because no-one ( general public ) wants or is interested in it they are doing a PR exercise because they've sunk too much money into it for it to be just discarded.

[zappaDPJ]

I hope that doesn't turn out to be the case because I'd expect most motherboard manufacturers to switch to it sooner rather than later. I believe MSI are already starting to mass producing UEFI based motherboards. The current BIOS won't support a lot of new technology that'll be arriving next very soon including the next generation of hard drives.

I was under the impression that UEFI should boot a lot faster than a standard BIOS. I recall seeing a demo of a ThinkPad T400/Windows 7 laptop booting from it in under 10 seconds not so long ago.

I've not had any hands on experience of it so I can only go by what I've read and most of what I've read so far has been quite positive but it's interesting and slightly worrying to hear another perspective on it.

[Holodene]

£99 for a 60GB SSD isn't exactly expensive. It's about performance and not mass storage.

[zappaDPJ]

SSD prices have plummeted but still seem to be very volatile, possibly linked to RAM prices? I want a 120GB unit to boot from and I've seen them go from £200 to £480 and now back down to around £180 which seems quite reasonable to me.

[john]

Here's a Youtube clip of a laptop booting using EUFI

[Odos]

Here's a Youtube clip of a laptop booting using EUFI

Nice but here's another example of what you can do when you don't have full information. This is from two years ago. Link