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Coming Soon: Say Goodbye to Bios, Say Hello to Booting Your PC in Seconds

bios

The BBC is reporting that Bios, the software that starts up your system, soon will be on its deathbed.  A new system, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, “will predominate in new PCs by 2011.”  Bios, the article points out, was never intended to be extensible over time, and has outlived its usefulness.  Mark Doran, head of the organization overseeing development of the technology, talked about its main benefit.

For consumers, said Mr Doran, the biggest obvious benefit of a machine running UEFI will be the speed with which it starts up.

“At the moment it can be 25-30 seconds of boot time before you see the first bit of OS sign-on,” he said. “With UEFI we’re getting it under a handful of seconds.”

“In terms of boot speed, we’re not at instant-on yet but it is already a lot better than conventional Bios can manage,” he said “and we’re getting closer to that every day.”

There are other benefits to UEFI as well, such as less trouble handling large drive sizes, and easier handling of extra peripherals.

The real question though – will we really ever see this?  And how many hours of your life will you save by eliminating a long boot sequence?

Image by ryuuji.y