

Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds - soitgoes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11430069

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listic
The fact that it takes seconds to probe and initialize the hardware is totally
unnecessary, because any modern OS worth its salt ('BSD, Linux, Mac OS,
Windows) will probably do it itself. It is still so because PC hardware
manufacturers prefer to retain status quo and not fix what is not broken. This
is so with many other things in PC architecture, as well. I.e. take the ATX
power connections: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX>. We could be using just
one voltage (+12V or other) going to the motherboard long ago. It would
simplify electrical design, thereby improving efficiency, thereby simplifying
cooling and lowering noise; and lowering costs in the process. But the
manufacturers are content with the status quo. If nothing else, the hint that
it is the right thing to do is that Google does it:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html>, search for "Gigabyte".

~~~
atuladhar
Really sorry to nitpick, but this one irks me to no end.

i.e., from Latin id est, means "that is" or "namely." e.g., from Latin exempli
gratia, means "for example."

~~~
listic
thanks for education! I thought i.e is "in example"

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frou_dh
Macs use EFI, don't they? My MBP cold boots fairly quickly, but nothing to
write home about.

~~~
noonespecial
The good part is holding the option key and getting a reasonable environment
to choose a startup disk.

My mac is the only computer I've ever had that can boot off a clone of my
internal disk stored on a USB extrenal disk. This has saved my ass more than
once.

"Target disk mode" is also reasonably awesome.

~~~
walkon
Booting to a USB drive is something any decent bios has been able to do for
the past 5+ years.

~~~
daniel02216
Can stock Windows boot from a USB drive? That'd be super convenient.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
It just depends on the BIOS. Nothing to do with windows. Virtually all
computers sold in the last 5 years or so can boot off of USB drives.

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lefstathiou
I cant tell you how many years I've been hearing this. Wasnt Vista supposed to
be almost instant?

~~~
epochwolf
The only thing I've found to be "almost instant" is waking up my mac from
sleep mode.

~~~
sprout
I've got a Dell Vostro 1510 w/ Vista sitting in front of me, and coming out of
sleep is "almost instant."

~~~
epochwolf
I know plenty of people are happy with Windows 7 and Vista but with me Windows
has such a bad history of crashing/hanging while coming out of
sleep/hibernation that I can't trust it.

~~~
wvenable
I don't think it's an issue anymore -- every modern machine I have right now
(even a netbook running XP) is flawless coming out of sleep/hibernation. From
my experience, the vast majority of windows laptop users almost never shutdown
their computers.

~~~
epochwolf
I've had two machines: an HP DV5000 (AMD/ATI) model and a Macbook Pro. Both of
them have not been reliable with sleep mode using a stock Windows XP/Vista
install (plus drivers/updates). I haven't tried Windows 7 in sleep mode yet
but it's not worth my time to risk losing work. I've only had OSX fail once
due to a crash* in sleep mode in 2 years (and over a thousand sleep/wake
cycles).

* I've had four failures to wake from sleep due to low battery in a 2 month span I was dealing with an old battery that was failing.

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frankc
Solid state drives can boost boot time quite a bit, and there are plenty of
metrics online to prove it. I suppose a bios upgrade could improve the time it
takes to go from POST to the intial OS bootstrapping, but once you get to the
OS loading, I don't see where the bios can make a difference? The OS load time
seems to be the biggest bottleneck to me, which is where the solid state fast
access times get their big wins.

~~~
bryanlarsen
My Ubuntu boots in 5 seconds off an SSD, but the BIOS takes 15 seconds.

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russell
Reminds me of a Science Fiction novel I read, where one of the characters was
a starship based super-AI. At the bottom-most layer of software was an
emulation of MS-DOS. In software, in the name of backwards-compatibility, our
worse mistakes (almost) never die .

~~~
pjscott
One of the more disturbing things in Portal is that GLaDOS stands for "Genetic
Life-form and Disk Operating System." The whole plot of the game revolves
around a malevolent and extremely advanced form of DOS.

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jfb
I particularly like the floppy disk clip art.

~~~
listic
Well, BIOS is floppy disk's peer (same age), and it contains code for
accessing floppy drive, and in many cases is most easily updated via floppy
disk; so this part makes sense.

Though today if one is using floppy disk at all, it will most likely be a 3.5"
1.44 MB High Density version, which is much younger than original model that
is BIOS peer (maybe it would be more exact to show older 5.25" floppy?) But in
general, they belong to the same age.

~~~
cryptoz
Off topic, but the Microsoft Office 2010 Save icon is _still_ a floppy disk.
Crazy.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ukschools/WindowsLiveWriter/...](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ukschools/WindowsLiveWriter/Top10reasonsOffice2010isgoodforschools_E4DD/image_2.png)

~~~
andrewf
I doubt it will ever change.

There's a generation of kids growing up right now who think that's an icon
which means "save" - they've never seen a floppy.

~~~
Splines
I wonder how many phrases/icons are there that apply to obsolete technology?

One that I can think of off the top of my head: The phrase "you left your
phone off the hook" to describe a phone that hasn't been turned off.

~~~
jleader
"dial tone"

"punch a clock"

~~~
stonemetal
Clock punching still happens some places.

~~~
jfb
Every morning at 4:45am in my house.

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saturdayplace
> Some PC and laptop makers are already using UEFI

Who? I'd be a lot less skeptical about widespread use, if I knew a Dell or an
HP were on board with this.

~~~
epochwolf
Doesn't apple use this already?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface>

~~~
jasonkeene
Yeah, Apple has used EFI for quite a while. My laptop still doesn't boot that
fast.

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teilo
Caveat Lector. Misleading title. This is not talking about OS boot speeds.
This is is talking about the time from flipping the switch until the OS begins
to load.

~~~
corysama
I'm still excited by this. Since I installed an SSD boot drive, the bios
startup time is half of my boot time.

------
bengl3rt
My friend's desktop computer is halfway through bringing up Win 7 before the
monitor even warms up... then again he boots off a PCI SSD.

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peterbessman
This is cool, though I think it might be late to the party. Doesn't everyone
just suspend/resume these days? Not that it's zero value, but it would have
been _really_ noteworthy 5-10 years ago.

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aphexairlines
UEFI demo on a thinkpad t400: <http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=560>

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cskau
Anyone got some kind of listing of machines using UEFI already ? I checked
Wikipedia, but it's quite scarce on concrete info.

~~~
aliguori
All recent IBM x86 servers use UEFI.

