Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds

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: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX</a>. 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: <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html</a>, search for "Gigabyte".

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

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

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.

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 .

I particularly like the floppy disk clip art.

&#62; Some PC and laptop makers are already using UEFI<p>Who? I'd be a lot less skeptical about widespread use, if I knew a Dell or an HP were on board with this.

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.

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.

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 <i>really</i> noteworthy 5-10 years ago.

UEFI demo on a thinkpad t400: <a href="http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=560" rel="nofollow">http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=560</a>

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