By John Breeden II

PCs have changed a lot in the past four decades, but one constant has been the Basic Input/Output System, BIOS, which handles the initialization process at startup and hands off control to the operating system. Pretty much every user is familiar with the BIOS acronym, even if they long ago forgot what the letters stood for. That’s about to change. There’s a new acronym on the block, UEFI, and it’s worth getting to know.

What it is: The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI, is a boot-level program that will replace BIOS on just about every new system from now on.

Unlike BIOS, which is a set of commands stored inside the firmware of a computer’s motherboard, UEFI is actually a program that can reside in non-volatile memory on a motherboard, or a hard drive, or even on a shared network drive.

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Source: GCN