New PCs could boot in seconds

Starting from next year, there’s a good chance that if you buy a new computer you’ll find that it boots up in only a matter of seconds in a long overdue out with the old and in with the new scenario.

I’m sure most would agree that ‘BIOS’ is now well and truly past its sell by date and UEFI, which has been designed to replace the archaic BIOS system in computers, and which stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a much needed upgrade.

“Conventional Bios is up there with some of the physical pieces of the chip set that have been kicking around the PC since 1979” the BBC quotes Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum as having said. Doran is overseeing development of the UEFI technology.

According to Doran, the creators of the BIOS only expected it to last for about 250,000 devices.

“They are as amazed as anyone else that now it is still alive and well in a lot of systems” said Doran.

Doran also said that evolution of the BIOS when compared to other components has been “phenomenally slow”.

As BIOS was originally intended for the basic PC system, and we have advanced well beyond that with tablet computers and other smaller and more mobile devices being churned out daily, it really is time to bring BIOS up to date.

AMI is a company that produces BIOS software and Brian Richardson, who is part of AMI’s technical team, told the BBC that problems arise because BIOS expects a machine to have an internal setup similar to the first PCs.

UEFI of course, doesn’t, and Mr Doran said that the biggest and most obvious benefit for consumers is that we will see much faster boot up times. I’m sure we all would appreciate that.

“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” and “we’re getting closer to that every day” says Doran.

When you think about it, it’s quite ridiculous that with all the advances in technology over the past few years it has still taken 3 decades to improve boot up times. Hurray for progress.