UEFI Explained - BIOS vs EFI/UEFI

In with the new, out with the old. UEFI not only looks snazzier but is replacing the old school BIOS on modern motherboards.

For the most part, this isn't very technical. There is really no magic to it; Nor smoke and mirrors. For decades computer systems have had a simple, keyboard-only BIOS. This BIOS always runs prior to booting in to your operating system. Basically, what the BIOS has always done is allow all the computer parts (hardware) to "check-in" so that all the parts can talk to one-another once the user boots in to the operating system.

The weird thing is that there has been no major upgrade to the interface nor the basic duties of the BIOS...even after all these years of hardware and operating system upgrades, the megahertz/cpu wars, and even the rise and fall of many input and output protocols.

Intel developed EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) as an upgrade to the old school BIOS that most computer geeks are familiar with. Then a bunch of companies jumped on board to refine it, so that it could be used by all. And the result: UEFI (Unified EFI).

For the average user, this is basically nothing... just another technology upgrade. To the computer enthusiast community, this is a long awaited upgrade. While retaining all the previous BIOS-like options, UEFI offers a fancy visual upgrade, the use of a mouse (instead of keyboard-only), quicker boot times and allows modern systems to boot from drives larger than 2TB (using GPT formatting).

What's GPT? Well, we'll cover that next time :-)

UPDATE: Read about GPT here.