2011: The Year We Say Goodbye to BIOS And Hello To UEFI

Are we looking at the final days of BIOS? Apparently so, if we’re to believe the BBC. Its replacement, UEFI (which I’ve taken to pronounce like UEFA, as in the UEFA Champions League), will be found on more and more PCs beginning next year. For end-users that immediately means one thing: much faster boot times.

The deal with BIOS is that it’s really quite old—it’s pushing 25 years old at this point. It’s not very efficient to try to run modern hardware when you’re constrained with that kind of legacy code.

Should your next PC use UEFI instead of BIOS you could see boot times go from minutes to seconds. I mean, your hard disk drive will still have to rev up, but it should no longer be the case where you can take a shower before you see the Windows logo.

And since the E in UEFI stands for extensible, it means it can be modified as companies develop cool new stuff for us to slap into your PC.

If this were Slashdot I’d say something like “I eagerly await our new UEFI overlords.”