DEL DEL DEL.
I've nonchalantly pressed the key several times now, waiting for the screen to get filled up with simplified colors of mostly blue and white. The glorified BIOS is coming, i thought.
Then boom!
To my surprise a GUI, complete with mouse, graphics and tabs appears in front of me. I was struggling with a moment of confusion as i don't remember installing this OS or app during the course of my 'primordial' task of setting up a new PC at this new office.
It was actually an EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) Bios that came with the motherboard (from Asus P8P67 Series). It's the first time i saw a BIOS that looked this good and supported this amount of graphics and a mouse. Finally, a GUI for the ancient BIOS that seemed to be a legacy technology from before i was born. (note: i'm kinda exclusive to 'IBM/PC for Windows' guy, don't know how it goes with Apple computers).
So, i did a little research and found out that this isn't something new! Not new at all. However, EFI (now officially called Unified EFI or UEFI) was originally released for Intel's Server platform called Itanium back in early 2000, which is practically the reason why not many computer people is able to use it now. It wasn't until recently that it is available for mass market.
If you guys want to find out a little more about UEFI, here are some links:
Evolution of BIOS
BIOS and EFI
and of course..
Wikipedia's Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface
From the name itself, the UEFI isn't actually just the interface that was being shown on my screen. It is a whole framework that is extensible, and the Graphical UI is just a module. There are many other things that it supports, extending far beyond the normal operations of the original BIOS functions - being a standards framework.
For my perticular rig, the initial screen (which can be changed) is a graphical display of the clock, statistics regarding the PC health (temperature, fan speed, etc); options for the boot sequence and basically profiles on PC performance (regarding overclocking, quite mode, etc).
There's support for several languages that can be changed at any time.
For all the detailed settings (the typical BIOS parameters, and then some) can be accessed at the 'Advanced Mode'. This is the part that looks familiar to the original BIOS but upgraded to the UEFI level of interface.
All the while, there is full mouse support so there is no need to toogle to every other settings using the keyboard's tab/arrow keys.
I should be more excited more about the framework though. Being a new framework, the possibilities of improved computing experience has actually expanded because of UEFI. However, can you really blame me for being giddy about the GUI. Hehe.
Again, this isn't something new and i'm worried there are a ton or more of things out there that i got left behind.
Whew! Gotta catch up.
Anyhow, that is the nature of technology.
Happy computing!
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