UEFI vs BIOS

[Executioner]

Can someone tell me why UEFI is better than the old BIOS? I recently worked on a laptop that had UEFI. At first, I was stumped as I never seen it before or even heard of it before. I guess I'm getting old and not keeping up with technology changes. All my systems are 5+ years in age or longer. None of them have UEFI.

[Err]

In my opinion, it really isn't better. It's more user friendly if you're new to computers. While it's nice to navigate using a mouse, I could always find the setting I was looking for using the arrow keys in the old bios.

[Losbot]

It's just the old BIOS with a facelift and mouse support.

[FlyingPenguin]

It's actually more than that. You can still have a graphical BIOS without UEFI. UEFI is the Bios that Apple has been using for quite a while for the same reason that MS also adopted it: Security. Windows Safe Boot (installed by default by OEMs since Win8) requires UEFI. It prevents anything from loading prior to the OS and thus mitigates boot sector viruses. It makes it very difficult (but not impossible) to load anything before the OS. That also makes it a pain for people like me. It can be a real pain to load a bootable USB or CD rescue drive on a UEFI system.

Most systems nowadays offer a key at boot time that gives allows you to boot from alternate media, but some don't without first booting into Windows or the Windows rescue flash drive first and then using the Windows method of accessing the boot menu.

Most enthusiast motherboards, and better OEM PCs allow you to boot from a CD or flash device in Legacy Bios mode as well (which is required, for instance, to run the current version of Spinrite). And enthusiast mobos allow you to disable UEFI entirely.

Personally, I disable UEFI if I can, or at least Safe Boot on my personal PCs. Allows me to use all the boot utilities I'm used to.