BIOS and UEFI As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
1,023 words · ~5 min read
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There's an old adage for computer noviceses that says if you can smash
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something with a hammer, it's hardware. But if you can only swear at it in
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futility, it's software. But not
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everything is that cut and dried. And one of the most important parts of your
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PC is actually a closely linked fusion of hardware and software. I'm talking
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about the basic input output system or
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BIOS, which I certainly don't recommend hitting with a hammer, by the way, no
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matter how upset you are. So, the BIOS is a very small piece of code that sits
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on a readonly or a flash memory chip on your computer's motherboard. It's often
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referred to as the motherboard's firmware since it links the software to
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the hardware. But how? Well, think about it kind of like a person. Your brain
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stem helps control very fundamental bodily functions like breathing and your
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heartbeat, but it doesn't do any actual thinking. So, your computer's BIOS does
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some very basic but crucial things
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without which you couldn't watch Tequiki or have your Red Bull fueled CSGO
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marathons, but it doesn't, you know, render graphics or anything like that.
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So, when you first turn your computer on, the BIOS is the first thing to
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spring into action and wake up the rest of your computer. Kind of like how your
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car's ignition gets the engine going. The BIOS first check settings stored in
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a SMOS chip to determine how the user wants the system to run. So, that's all
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that stuff that's in the utility that you get to by mashing delete or F2 when
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you first boot up. Then, what it does is it initializes your devices accordingly.
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CPU, RAM, graphics card, peripherals, and so on. After this, the BIOS will run
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the power on self test or post to make sure that all the gizmos inside your
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case are functioning correctly. If
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everything is hunky dory, you'll usually hear a single beep to let you know that
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everything's good, provided that you installed the little speaker that came
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with your motherboard. If you get an error, you know, like beep beep beep
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beep beep. It's not Morse code. It's probably telling you you need to receat
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your RAM or a video card or check for a
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part that's just plain gone kaput. Once that's done, the BIOS will check for a
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bootable device, meaning some kind of drive with an operating system on it,
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and then it'll hand off control of your computer to the OS. Now, old school
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BIOSes often provided a link between your keyboard, mouse, and other devices
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and the OS. While modern operating systems like newer versions of Windows
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control the hardware more directly. So once you're at the Windows desktop, your
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BIOS basically goes to sleep until you need it to start things up again. Seems
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pretty straightforward, right? Well, sort of actually. The way that the BIOS
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was implemented for a long time had some very serious limitations. One of the
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most obvious of them being drive support. The system that a conventional
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BIOS uses to access your hard drive or SSD called the master boot record or MBR
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could only handle partitions less than
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two terabytes. And that was fine for a long time. But with many modern hard
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drives holding way more data, it became
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obvious that something new was needed. The unified extensible firmware
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interface or UEFI, which no one can agree how to pronounce, was born. Not
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only can UEFI deal with insanely large storage devices, we're talking millions
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of pedabytes here, it's also quicker than a conventional BIOS to boot up and
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can use an actual graphical interface complete with animations and mouse
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support. Older BIOSes only featured that blue screen that looked kind of like a
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crash, but it was fine, which at least I guess was better than the really old
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days where there was no BIOS utility at all and you had to physically move
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